Why Mud Eraser?

[Sorra the Orc]

I was just watching the video for the latest spawner pack and it prompts a question. It uses a different pattern from all other spawners and this is different from the best practice I have learned from you folks. So why the change?

More specifically, it has a Mud Eraser level that, according to the video, should be enabled if you are respawning the villages/houses etc. since these will texture the terrain and the Mud Eraser will remove these textures. In the past the guidance has always been to put the texture spawner first and then have other spawners that change the textures after that. This has always worked well for me and means you can't forget to turn the layer on/off as required.

Why the change? What is the problem this is solving? I'm trying to figure out if I should adopt this new approach or not.

[Ben Black]

Hey @Sorra the Orc, the texture spawner is where it is because the villages and houses also alter the height map of the terrain, this means that if we didnt have the texture spawner under the buildings there would be areas around the villages/houses where there is stone where it should not be, or grass on a very steep slope. This would go on to mess up the grass spawner and other nature spawners and would not produce the optimal look around our village. As for the mud eraser, because we need to have the texture spawner below the villages, the best practice of keeping textures first does not work(if we want to only have one spawner adding textures to our terrain). So I decided to use the mud eraser spawn rule that users could tick on or off depending on weather or not they wanted to wipe the terrain of previous gena texture spawns. Thinking now, I believe that you could also have a texture wipe spawner at the very top that doesn't do anything but clear all textures and everything would work well, though there would be another spawner in the biome. Let me know if this sort of wipe spawner would improve the pack and ill add it for the next version.

[Sorra the Orc]

That makes sense. Thank you.

From a UX perspective I would say this should go on the feature list. It is going to be very common that people want to clear all the data. Doing it with a "clear" biome makes sense to me, but even better would be a button/checkbox/something that is there without the need for the user to create it. this would clear textures and revert heightmap changes performed by previous spawns. 

Implementation wise it seems you already have everything in place )heightmap restore, biome for clearing textures). So this is "just" a user interface feature.

Anyway, for now I understand the reasoning, thanks for explaining.