[A16]Better Terrain

[blackhalo]

I hope that helps!

That's surprisingly useful.  Like that's a whole biome painted out and then some.  Thank you.

Having the map be generally very foresty alone will give it a different feel, having forests butt right up to lakes like in those pics and if I can get longer lakes instead of large meandering rivers or circular lakes with occasional more gray'ish rock outcroppings... that might look really good

The 2 big hurdles are...finding a way to give different shapes to lakes in different terrain types.  With some luck in the code and more thought I MIGHT be able to do it.  Depending how easy it is to tweak the shapes in the assembly noise maps.  The 2nd hurdle, like always, is the time consuming process of making art assets, doubly tough for dense dense forests.  If the trees or shrubs look too similiar or if the shading/colors are a bit too bold it just looks bad.

[asquirrel]

Thanks man!   Edit - will this affect mods that lay down random structures or put down new minerals?

[A Friend]

Pretty and gives map variety despite being in a single biome.

[blackhalo]

Thanks man!   Edit - will this affect mods that lay down random structures or put down new minerals?

I just uploaded a new version that will not, 0.033

I doubt many if any mods edit the same GenSteps I do.  And if they do your better off letting my mod overwrite their stuff anyways
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Tommorow i'm probably going to get cracking into boreal forests since they probably will be easier than shrublands.

[blackhalo]

Ok, I added a noise map to trees, so they scatter more in bunches by time instead of purely randomly.

http://imgur.com/myuftxj

I should have Boreal up in a day or two, all thats left is editing a dozen trees so they look good in a dense forest, and maybe trying to get some better bushes/debris in there.  Maybe adding a slightly deeper blue color to water in it.

[Napple]

What are your plans for ice sheets and sea ice.

[Qwynn]

I return with some temperate feedback for you!

You really nailed the cradle of civilization idea, I think. The maps have an intense great lakes and prairies feeling going for them, which is very different than vanilla generation and makes rather interesting and gorgeous maps. Great work!

The only real suggestion I can give is that perhaps the pine density is a bit too high for the type of area you want to emulate and the removal of oak trees from the biome seems a bit odd!

I took some screenshots of various 400x400 temperate maps with a slightly different tree weights for some food for thought.

I seriously love your water distribution though. It's absolutely stunning.

[Naxdar]

The clustering of trees is nice but it behaves weirdly with Vegetable garden (screenshot). VG normally generates these trees somewhat sparsely, since they give a lot of food.
Other places on the map look a bit alien.
Also, some types of soil (plains, gravel) have a fertility value but it is not possible to set growing zones on them, is that intended?

[blackhalo]

I return with some temperate feedback for you!

You really nailed the cradle of civilization idea, I think. The maps have an intense great lakes and prairies feeling going for them, which is very different than vanilla generation and makes rather interesting and gorgeous maps. Great work!

The only real suggestion I can give is that perhaps the pine density is a bit too high for the type of area you want to emulate and the removal of oak trees from the biome seems a bit odd!

I took some screenshots of various 400x400 temperate maps with a slightly different tree weights for some food for thought.

I seriously love your water distribution though. It's absolutely stunning.

<3

Yeah I only have pine trees in temperate atm since the map looks much worse without them, I'm going to move oak and birch in when I finish their art.  That's a good point on tree density though, I've been thinking over that same thing.  Right now I'm thinking of making temperate forests have larger but less dense forests to make a bigger difference from boreal.

The clustering of trees is nice but it behaves weirdly with Vegetable garden (screenshot). VG normally generates these trees somewhat sparsely, since they give a lot of food.
Other places on the map look a bit alien.
Also, some types of soil (plains, gravel) have a fertility value but it is not possible to set growing zones on them, is that intended?

Thank you!!!
I should be able to fix that.  The plains sowing issue too.

Edit: Ok, I fixed it.  You have to load my mod after Vegetable Garden though.  I gave a special sowtag to all the plants my mod knows of (vegetable gardens will undo that if you load it after) and anything without that tag will be distributed old school style.  I should have that fix up tomorrow along with my next release.  The only conflict that still exists is the specific stats for vanilla trees, I might switch over to theirs though if they make more sense.

The plains issue was wierder... apparently you can't sow on terrain with under 50%~ fertility.  So I upped plains to 75% from 35 and then made more dry grass so it still looks fine.

[Naxdar]

I tried the latest version (0.044) and there is odd shadows under trees and bushes.

[blackhalo]

I tried the latest version (0.044) and there is odd shadows under trees and bushes.

Thank you!!!

Thats an alpha 'plant' i placed in there to spice up terrain, its not supposed to look like that though, it must have gotten distorted in zipping or githubbing or something, I'll see what I can do.  Shouldn't take more than a couple mins.

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Ok, uploading to github atm, not sure what went wrong so I'm just removing that for now.  You should probably delete the old version, at least the texture folder in it, before unzipping it into mods.

[Stormfox]

This looks stunning. I am looking forward to the finished product.

Am I right to assume that the only mods this could conflict with are others that change map generation? Or does the fact that you edit the trees somehow interact with mods that do something with the wood they drop?

Does your mod also change the way trees and other greenery regrow or only the initial distribution?

[blackhalo]

This looks stunning. I am looking forward to the finished product.

Am I right to assume that the only mods this could conflict with are others that change map generation? Or does the fact that you edit the trees somehow interact with mods that do something with the wood they drop?

Does your mod also change the way trees and other greenery regrow or only the initial distribution?

Mods that edit vanilla plants will conflict and this mod has to be loaded after them.  The conflicts should be minor if this mod is loaded after.  My stuff will override only vanilla plants.  That means their work to chop down and resources when gathered and art and of course number of them on the map will be set to my values.  I'm open to suggestions for editing the values in my mod though.

Mods that edit vanilla terrain will conflict.  Anything like 'darker fertile soil'.  The conflicts should be minor though.  Worst case scenario, you load it after my mod, the colors clash it looks more ugly and possibly the higher/lower fertility value than what I set the terrain to might slightly change plant distribution.

There's no way around that atm :/

The plants have vanilla settings for regrowing.   That's a good point though, I should look into how that plays in with my initial plant distribution.  From what I know atm plants 'grow' new ones a short distance from an existing plant, so worst case scenario is that the map will very very... very... slowly grow out of the beautiful distributions I have set.  I'll see if I can fix that.

Short of that, there shouldn't really be many conflicts.  I don't touch Ancient structures and whatnot, so all the 'more structures in map' mods should be fine.   EDB's Prepare carfully works fine.  Vegetable garden works fine.

[b4d]

A minor issue, The tall grass graphic is overlapping with some other stuff (graveyard & growing zone in this pic)

It was also a bit hard to distinguish between soil, plains and good soil(I blame those grasses  )
and damn those raspberries was really hard to spot   

The generated map was awesome though

using the 0.046 version

[attachment deleted by admin due to age]

[Qwynn]

Version 0.46 has a syntax error in Plants_Wild_Arid.xml on line 134:

Code Select Expand


<<ThingDef ParentName="PlantBase">


Additionally, agave and pincushion plants in the same file are looking for a parent which doesn't exist.

Temperate is looking even better! Glad to see some new textures and Vegetable Garden compatibility. That said, I am missing the dandelion fields. Are you planning to add them back to temperate or in a different biome, or were they cut for good?

There also seems to be a strange texture issue with rich soil. You'll want to open this image up all the way, but there seem to be these short orange streaks? Not sure what's causing those. =<