[A16]Better Terrain

Started by blackhalo, February 02, 2017, 04:59:17 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Vallarthis

Temperate at 80% sounds better to my mind; it gives temperate a slightly different feel, while still being quite hospitable, because sometimes people will want a biome that isn't going to kick them in the teeth TOO hard. Boreal at 125% surprised me: it's my favorite, and I don't feel it needs a boost. What made you go that route, may I ask?

Also: Hi! This mod looks amazing! Thank you for sharing it with us. I can't wait to try it out.

Mythos

Hey there,

this is a really cool mod you are making!
But I have two questions:
- Do the trees really need to have a prefix? (in this case "BT_" causing that I need to create a comp. patch for SeedsPlease)
- When I create a growing zone, the Cecropia don't look like the generated ones. Is this WIP or am I doing something wrong?

For the last question: I'm loading Vegetable Garden before Better Terrain, otherwise BT is relatively near at the end of the list, so nothing should be overriding it.

Best Regards,
Mythos

DnaJur

#107
I think having less surface steel is okay but perhaps should be better telegraphed to the players by including that into description of the mod.
I think there are enough ways to get steel in the game. For example, you have a lot of farmable land but no steel? Start a massive drug production and in a year, you will be able to order bulk traders nonstop and buy any amount of steel you need. Same can be done if you have some wood/stone and a person who is good at art. There is still deep drilling and steel chunk/raider gear smelting (I also heard that organs sell well these days). If you are running mods than chances are you also have additional sources of steel (Resource plants from Vegetable garden or Core mining or others).
That being said, I think temperate tiles should be averagely balanced since those are the tiles that new players are most likely to play.

ambivalence

Thanks for your mod. I have a question: is it compatible with «Snowy Trees»? If not, I beg you, make something :(



Thanks again.

blackhalo

#109
Quote from: Vallarthis on February 14, 2017, 01:23:43 PM
Temperate at 80% sounds better to my mind; it gives temperate a slightly different feel, while still being quite hospitable, because sometimes people will want a biome that isn't going to kick them in the teeth TOO hard. Boreal at 125% surprised me: it's my favorite, and I don't feel it needs a boost. What made you go that route, may I ask?

Also: Hi! This mod looks amazing! Thank you for sharing it with us. I can't wait to try it out.

Honestly i just upped it since the art I was going to start working on for it was a lil rocky in theme.
When I get around to really really updating that specifically I was going to make the forests patchy and dense but outside of them most the ground will look pretty rocky with boulders and stuff and more rivers/streams. 

That all means its going to be slightly less hospitable than the temperate forest... so I figured more rocks, but I actually think your right.  I might just move it pretty close to vanilla at very least for the moment.

Quote from: Mythos on February 14, 2017, 04:08:28 PM
Hey there,

this is a really cool mod you are making!
But I have two questions:
- Do the trees really need to have a prefix? (in this case "BT_" causing that I need to create a comp. patch for SeedsPlease)
- When I create a growing zone, the Cecropia don't look like the generated ones. Is this WIP or am I doing something wrong?

For the last question: I'm loading Vegetable Garden before Better Terrain, otherwise BT is relatively near at the end of the list, so nothing should be overriding it.

Best Regards,
Mythos

Oh boy.  Its like when I do something to make this mod more compatible with one, it breaks 2 others.
I made the trees that way since any mod conflicting and overriding a tree I use is really bad.  It'll mess up the placement of the tree, turning it into vanilla RNG, so I figured it'd be the safest way to setup the mod.

The planting sprites is a WIP.  I figured since, you know, crop rows aren't that beautiful in general it wouldn't be a devastating loss if I put off till later.  So yeah, nothing is overriding it, its just me not sure how I want to deal with the situation.

blackhalo

#110
Quote from: ambivalence on February 14, 2017, 05:42:55 PM
Thanks for your mod. I have a question: is it compatible with «Snowy Trees»? If not, I beg you, make something :(

Thanks again.

Last I heard its a no, but that is too beautiful for me to not see what I can do.

Quote from: DnaJur on February 14, 2017, 05:03:48 PM
I think having less surface steel is okay but perhaps should be better telegraphed to the players by including that into description of the mod.

Yeah, the toughest part is communicating that an area is now suddenly for a specific playstyle (low precious metal, exc exc), hmmmmm I might just start screwing with the descriptions when the player is choosing an area.  Put allot of stuff in CAPS LOCK so people notice it.

Even so I might reserve drastic things (like super low steel) to more obscure enviornments, like maybe shrublands or deserts.

Zxypher

Man I'm loving a lot of what this mod does with one notable exception. Those tiny little bits of mountain/hill all over the place. They are often in the way and make lots of overhead mountain which can be rather annoying because of infestations.

Keep up the excellent work!

blackhalo

Quote from: Zxypher on February 15, 2017, 09:23:14 AM
Man I'm loving a lot of what this mod does with one notable exception. Those tiny little bits of mountain/hill all over the place. They are often in the way and make lots of overhead mountain which can be rather annoying because of infestations.

Keep up the excellent work!

hmmmm.  Never thought of it that way.  I just thought it looked nicer (give a little bit of depth to an otherwise flat world). 

I'll see what I can do about it.

Zxypher

Quote from: blackhalo on February 15, 2017, 04:10:59 PM

hmmmm.  Never thought of it that way.  I just thought it looked nicer (give a little bit of depth to an otherwise flat world). 

I'll see what I can do about it.

It totally does help break up the large open spaces which I think is good, I just personally hate dealing with all the leftover mountain roofs. I think I can use dev tools to delete them but if there's a way to just not have them made in the first place that'd be sweet. Otherwise I know there are other mods for dealing with it. :)

AngleWyrm

#114
Just tried a Tropical Forest start, and its swiss cheesed with marsh water. The marsh water is not compatible with the Bridges mod, nor is it compatible with the FishingIndustry mod's fishing pier. I get the feeling this was an intentional change to game difficulty so I have something to say about that:

Game difficulty is a user setting. Altering it changes the number of people willing to play at a given setting/map.

If I'm playing on Peaceful or Base Builder setting it's because I specifically don't want any developer challenges charging me for playing Rimworld. And if I'm playing on Extreme it's because I want to conquer everything the developers can throw at me.

If there is still some desire to alter the difficulty, then a solution might be to hook into the Story-Teller difficulty setting when generating the map. Or create a separate difficulty slider in Mod/Options if the story teller setting isn't available.
My 5-point rating system: Yay, Kay, Meh, Erm, Bleh

blackhalo

#115
Quote from: AngleWyrm on February 16, 2017, 06:54:14 PM
Just tried a Tropical Forest start...

Thank you!
I should have looked at those mods to find out how they decide if something is is water before making the greener marsh water.  But rest assured, nothing I do is intended to break other mods in order to make the game harder :)

It'd be cool if I could make different biomes feel different to play, but overall difficulty is for other mods.  I was playing around with the idea a bit ago of making some stuff just harder, but have taken ideas like yours into consideration and I'd rather this was more of a beautiful biomes mod.
Thanks for playtesting, thanks for feedback, I'll see what I can do about those compatibilities and maybe messing with the water shape/frequency.

I have a pretty cool change to de-blockify terrain coming up next patch also, been diving head first into C# to get it all working and so far it seems well worth it.

Napple

Reporting Incompatibility with Wishmaster's smarter food selection. Tamed animals don't eat the new plants.

ambivalence

Quote from: Napple on February 17, 2017, 12:10:41 AM
Reporting Incompatibility with Wishmaster's smarter food selection. Tamed animals don't eat the new plants.

too bad, that's a good one :-[

blackhalo

#118
Quote from: Napple on February 17, 2017, 12:10:41 AM
Reporting Incompatibility with Wishmaster's smarter food selection. Tamed animals don't eat the new plants.

Thanks.
I'll add it to my 'make it compatible' list.
Probably get around to it tommorow or the day after.

----
any feedback on people/animals being drawn behind plants?  I'm probably going to get working on the C# code to get it in and avoiding mod conflicts soon if it is playing out well.

So, does it look funky with items still being drawn on top? are there clipping issues I missed? is it annoying not being able to see animals/exc.

AngleWyrm

#119
Quote from: blackhalo on February 16, 2017, 09:19:28 PM
I was playing around with the idea a bit ago of making some stuff just harder, but have taken ideas like yours into consideration and I'd rather this was more of a beautiful biomes mod.

I don't code C#, but something in pseudo-code might make a clean solution apparent:

currentDifficultySetting = GetDifficulty()
someMapVariable = setOfMapVariables[currentDifficultySetting]

That way you could integrate your desire to make harder stuff into the difficulty of the game, so that the environment presents a range of difficulty that reflects what the player wants to experience in a given game. It could add interest to exploring possible worlds and so add to replay value.
My 5-point rating system: Yay, Kay, Meh, Erm, Bleh