How do I draw biome maps?

[Jool the Planet]

I was thinking about creating a planet pack for KSP Kopernicus from the KSP 2 planet pack discussion. It got me curious about how to draw biome maps because I see every planet packs to have biome maps per each planet.

[Starhawk]

This question related to creating an add-on has been moved here from KSP Discussion.

[KerikBalm]

On 3/6/2022 at 5:13 AM, Jool the Planet said:

I was thinking about creating a planet pack for KSP Kopernicus from the KSP 2 planet pack discussion. It got me curious about how to draw biome maps because I see every planet packs to have biome maps per each planet.

You just make a .jpg file with different colors for your biomes.

Example for Duna:

You can find more here:

https://github.com/Kopernicus/kittopia-dumps/tree/master/BiomeMaps

In the Kopernicus config (example for duna here: https://github.com/Kopernicus/kittopia-dumps/blob/master/Configs/Duna.cfg )

You just define your biomes, using the Red, Green, Blue, values for the colors on your map:

Spoiler

Biomes
	{
	Value
	{
	name = Poles // The name of this biome.
	displayName = Poles // The displayed name of the biome. Can be a localization tag.
	value = 0 // A value that gets multiplied with every amount of science that is returned in the biome.
	color = 1,1,1,1 // The color of the biome on the biome map.
	}
	Value
	{
	name = Midlands // The name of this biome.
	displayName = Midlands // The displayed name of the biome. Can be a localization tag.
	value = 0 // A value that gets multiplied with every amount of science that is returned in the biome.
	color = 0.988235295,0.549019635,0.349019617,1 // The color of the biome on the biome map.
	}
	Value
	{
	name = Lowlands // The name of this biome.
	displayName = Lowlands // The displayed name of the biome. Can be a localization tag.
	value = 0 // A value that gets multiplied with every amount of science that is returned in the biome.
	color = 0.913725495,0.41568628,0.192156866,1 // The color of the biome on the biome map.
	}
	Value
	{
	name = Craters // The name of this biome.
	displayName = Craters // The displayed name of the biome. Can be a localization tag.
	value = 0 // A value that gets multiplied with every amount of science that is returned in the biome.
	color = 0.717647076,0.396078438,0.00392156886,1 // The color of the biome on the biome map.
	}

In that example above, the poles are white, so RGB is 1,1,1, The lowlands are orangish, so have  high red value, but low green and blue (color = 0.913725495, 0.41568628, 0.192156866, 1). The last "1" is the "Alpha" value I think, IIRC, its basically a multiplier for all the other values, just leave it at 1.

So draw your biome map, and use the RGB values (if your color tool gives you values from 0-255, just normalize, ie divide the red, green, blue values by 255).

Of course, you probably want to have your biomes match a heightmap, so something more complicated than MS paint would be nice to be able to display a heighmap image in one layer, and allow you to paint a biome map over it in another layer.