FakenameBill
commented
3 years ago Perhaps showing oceans in the a1.2.0-b1.7.3 biome system could be a toggle in the application? I know there's a flag somewhere in the files that toggles whether or not oceans are shown (or at least there was in the old experimental branch for beta support), but at least for now it can't be toggled at runtime.
Currently, for this version range, underwater regions are only assigned two biomes - Ocean and Frozen Ocean. Land regions, however, are given full biome descriptions, resulting in biome transitions in water regions not being described fully.
While the current ocean biomes could be reused for this purpose for different temperature regions, I think it'd be better to abandon reusing ocean biomes in this case entirely, as there was no concept of ocean "biomes" in the code at the time. The preferred option would be to introduce new biomes entirely, corresponding to the land biomes, but with " - Underwater" appended, and given dedicated colors to make the biome shapes clearer.
Here's the transition at the depth noise far lands (vanilla bug), where terrain raises up to ten or so block, eliminating most ocean regions. Note how the biome detail continues in this area, despite the ocean region to its left being completely monotonous and not showing those internal details: