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Make world limits not forced to water level

Started by Markohs, November 16, 2012, 01:39:10 PM

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Markohs

What do you think of removing the current limitation in simutrans to have map border tiles with height to water? Whoudn't it give more freedom to the map to let it have aribtrary heights? Is it hard to implement?

We can maybe remove this limit and make the map be a rectangle floating in space like SimCity does:



Fabio

IMHO it would be just wonderful!
Could you take care of it yourself? ;)

Markohs

Quote from: Fabio on November 16, 2012, 02:18:51 PM
IMHO it would be just wonderful!
Could you take care of it yourself? ;)

haha sure, I got this idea when checking the land display code I have to modify for the OpenGL backend. Wanted to hear oppinions about it before modifying this. ;)

Fabio

Related to this (and mentioned by Prissi in double height project thread) it would be nice to have vertical slopes textured and calculated/cropped on the fly.

Markohs

You mean the vertical walls in the boarder of the map?

Or all the slopes in-game?

ӔO

I support this. It gets a bit awkward designing hilly maps, when the edges get trimmed down, because it must touch water.
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prissi

A map does not need to be edited to go down at the border, that is done by simutrans itself upon loading.

Fabio

Still it would be nice what Markohs proposes, with map edges higher than sea level.

Markohs

Yeah, will have it a look. Will simplify the opengl display of the map too.

Fabio

Quote from: Markohs on November 16, 2012, 03:09:29 PM
You mean the vertical walls in the boarder of the map?

Or all the slopes in-game?

Well, vertical walks at the map border will need to be rendered on the fly, as they could have any arbitrary height, according to the map.
Personally, I believe the game would benefit from all walls being rendered instead of coming from pngs, especially with the future double height project integration.
The only drawback would be the nice arches from pak96.comic would be lost. Maybe it could work like the oceans: rendered from textures, but if images are provided for some walls, you use the image instead of rendering it.

isidoro

Another advantage of making the world limit not forced to water level happens when you want to enlarge the map.  Current behavior produces scars where the map limits used to be...


Markohs

 Yea, many advantages and no drawbacks so far. Working on this.

Quote from: Fabio on November 16, 2012, 10:41:58 PM
The only drawback would be the nice arches from pak96.comic would be lost. Maybe it could work like the oceans: rendered from textures, but if images are provided for some walls, you use the image instead of rendering it.

Had to install the pack to see what did you mean. That pak looks great, are you refering to this?



what whould be good is implementing multiple slopes texture sources, that one can be created from a texture too

Fabio


IgorEliezer

Quote from: Markohs on November 16, 2012, 01:39:10 PM
Really pretty. Having cities "growing down" the hill borders was pretty annoying. So I always start new maps with my towns away from the borders.

However, I'm not sure if vertical borders would turn out well. Think of building a tunnel next to the border.

What if only the surface were rendered over a black (or another neutral color) canvas?

Off-topic: I see a compass in Markohs' screenshot. I'd like to see one implemented in Simutrans, since I rotate the map a lot and get lost. :)

Fabio

Quote from: IgorEliezer on November 17, 2012, 10:48:22 PMWhat if only the surface were rendered over a black (or another neutral color) canvas?

If walls are made on the fly, I can see use for 3 different textures: open country walls, city walls, map border walls. We have the first 2 already, a 3rd one for the border would be sensible.

Of course this could be plain black, as plain black could be the outside tiles, just up to each pakset.

Ashley

This would be a very good change - always irritated me having the edges of the map dip down to sea level.
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treiskin

Mabey we should program Simutrans so it randomly generates a terrain next to the map?

kierongreen

It may be helpful to note that my new landscape code has no limits on the cliff height it will display (although there is one line of code that fixes how high a cliff you can create)...

prissi

The problem is rather that the cliffs belong to the tile in front, where the map do not have a tile in front ...

Markohs

mmm... This is my new personal project now, will help me to understand the ground and terrain code better than I do now. I think I can reuse the climate code images to generate the borders, let's see what can be done. Autogenration of slopes too. I'll leave the compass for somebody else. ;)

Markohs

Working on this, some progress already.

On of the problems that arise with this patch is that we need to add a new concept to siutrans map settings, that's the lowest allowed level on a map. Right now I just fixed it to 10 levels under sea level, but that needs more thinking.

We also need graphics for the outside area, right now I just used outside waters graphics, but it doesn't look so good.

I'll implement removing water level height on borders now, we'll see if many problems arise (tunnels will have to be checked for example).

Just a WIP screenshot, many work still to do but well, here is is.


An_dz

Amazing, it's looking very good. You're really good Markohs.
You can try with 96comic, it doesn't use water tiles for outside.

Markohs

Thx An_dz, but Dwachs and prissi work way harder than me and program better. :)

Still much work to do, but I feel this will end looking very good.


Fabio

I would see well pure black for both outside and border wall. It would also be nice to have outside layer at the same level as the main water level.
Otherwise it's outstanding!

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Markohs

It will be easy to switch in-game how to display the world, right now my idea is implementing it with pure colors and allow the pakset to define wich colours to use at wich depths, including the ocean color. Maybe in the future we can implement textures too, or just draw the world on black, like floating in the space, or to not draw walls at all.

The idea is looking very similar to simcity 2, but will allow customizations on each pak.

Markohs

If you look at the screenshot I posted:



I want to simulate the seabed like simcity does, right now simutrans paints deep waters as darker, I want to simulate that too. Water level right now, defaults to -2, that whould be shown laterally like a small depression, and when the water is even deeper, more slopes. About the ground slice as I menctioned, I'll do something similar to the current climate code that defines intervals of heights with its textures, I'll just start with colors. SC2 looks like also applies a granular texture, we'll see if we can implement that too.

jamespetts

This is a nice idea! I agree that the tiles outside the map ought to be black or some neutral colour. If you can find a way of texturing the edges to show the sea bed and different colours for different heights of water, even better!
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IgorEliezer

Quote from: Markohs on January 22, 2013, 06:10:33 PMor just draw the world on black, like floating in the space, or to not draw walls at all.
That's the one I'd pick. I feel that walls would kill a bit of the "magic" in the game that makes me believe that entire world is there, at least in my sense.

I don't want to mean that I'm against, on the contrary, surely there are people that like it (that's what makes everything interesting); a "hide/show world borders" would be welcome. :)

Markohs


Markohs

This is taking me a bit extra time than I expected, world limits to 0 was assumed in various parts of the code and required a bit extra coding, like the lower/raise tool, the drawing algorithm and more. Not far from done now, so far disabled the slopes, that need extra codingand I still I'm unsure of how to implement.



Fabio


greenling

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Fabio

This would improve greatly the maps of landlocked regions of the world (e.g. The map of Czech Republic)

Next would be non-square maps, especially (or only) maps generated with heightmaps, where a special color could specify outer tiles meant to be non playable and painted black.