[devel-new-2 3071c03] Landscaping by dragging

[Rollmaterial]

It was previously possible to raise and lower land quickly by dragging. Could this be restored?

[jamespetts]

I did wonder about this. This was occasioned by a change that I imported from Standard, and this is how it used to work in Standard, so I assumed that it was intentional (and was unsure about the reason for this). However, testing Standard just now, the dragging still works in Standard, so I will try to find out why this does not work in Experimental any longer and see if I can restore the functionality - when I have finished looking into the desync issue on which I am currently working.

[Junna]

Seems also to result in a strange change of climate to the tiles around it.

[jamespetts]

Hmm - this is a different issue, I think. Can you elaborate?

[Junna]

Using the lower/whatever terrain editing feature results in the climate of the tiles change changing to beach, irrespective of height.

[jamespetts]

Hmm - I cannot reproduce this, I am afraid. Does this occur universally for you (i.e. any tile raised or lowered in any circumstances always becomes beach), or only in certain circumstances?

[Junna]

Universally; the artificial slope, raise land, all of them. Tried in all areas of map, different heights. I'll see if it is reproducible after the landscaping bug in the first post is fixed.

[jamespetts]

That is most odd - I  do not understand why the behaviour is inconsistent between our builds here.

[Junna]

http://www.mediafire.com/file/4g5z26gn9h897ly/ders608.sve

Save game.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/axlh8k9dmei13lh/Pak128.Britain-Ex-0.9.2J.rar

Pak, same as last, so if you have the last this should not be required, but in the event that you are lacking.

Addendum: With some more testing, I cannot reproduce this accurately with Ves's build of the executable, though some low lying areas seem to change climate when you modify them inversely of what they should do (raising land on a low grass tile will make it not darker/higher grass, but beach, and so on).

You should fix the terrain drag thing though, it's unbearable to play when you can't modify the land without doing it tile by tile.

[Vladki]

I have also noticed that terraforming turns lowland to beach. However it happens only up to 2 height levels above seshore, not higher.

[jamespetts]

I looked into this but did not have time in the end to track down fully the cause. This seems to be related to a change made to Standard a while ago which I recently merged into Experimental relating to the way in which the relationship between climate and height was handled; it was described in the Standard commit message as a fix.

What appears to happen is that the climate heights become out of sync with the climates in an existing saved game so that raising or lowering tiles re-synchronises them with the new settings under which tiles of that height are "beach". If you raise the tiles by enough, they will revert to lowlands, plains, etc..

I think that this affects only older saved games - I am not yet sure why altering the climate settings in the advanced settings dialogue does not fix this.

[Junna]

What about the landscape dragging issue? It is quite critical in terms of playability.

[jamespetts]

I will have to look into that, too: I am currently prioritising the issue in which MinGW builds will crash, as this should allow stable online play as well as automatic Windows nightly builds once it is resolved.

[jamespetts]

I think that I have fixed the dragging issue; would you be able to re-test?

[Junna]

It is fixed now.

[jamespetts]

Excellent, thank you.