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Cliffs higher than two levels/Decoration walls below more constructions

Started by Václav, June 05, 2013, 06:35:52 PM

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Václav

I found that currently it is possible to make cliffs (walls) high only two levels - for example from 1 to 3 (1 - 2, 2 - 3).

At first I would like to know why this limitation - of two levels.
At second I would like to ask for allowing to make cliffs high up to four or five levels.

And at third, partly aside of main request, I think it would be good if decoration walls would be not only below any buildings (factory, res, com, ind, ... and so on) but also below transportation constructions (roads, railways, tramways, taxiways, runways,  ... and so on).




Chybami se člověk učí - ale někteří lidé jsou nepoučitelní

Ters

The limitiation has something to do with the way terrain is stored. This might change somewhat with the double height patch, but depending on whether the pak, it might just mean twice as many levels within the same visual height. Or maybe even such a massive change wasn't able to change the limitation, I haven't checked.

kierongreen

Double height patch removes this limitation in terms of graphics but still imposes a limit of 2 height difference for single height paks, or 4 when it's a half height pak. Reason is that otherwise it becomes difficult to work out where tiles are.

As for wall vs rock for ways, well quite often ways are dug into the rock so to me it looks better having this showing.

An_dz

1 cliff is almost 2,5 levels. 2 cliffs is a 5 level building. A wall this big already struggles to battle gravity and for sure will collapse soon, to me it's kind of a reality limitation.

Ters

Quote from: An_dz on June 06, 2013, 04:17:08 PM
1 cliff is almost 2,5 levels. 2 cliffs is a 5 level building.

That depends on the graphics in the pak set.

Quote from: An_dz on June 06, 2013, 04:17:08 PM
A wall this big already struggles to battle gravity and for sure will collapse soon, to me it's kind of a reality limitation.

Walls could perhaps be much higher if they sloped backwards, however Simutrans can't deal with that. A fully 3D Simutrans could be able to do such things, but that's a long way away (in fact, I'm not sure there has been any progress at all).

Václav

Quote from: kierongreen on June 06, 2013, 06:20:17 AM
Reason is that otherwise it becomes difficult to work out where tiles are.
Ahh, thanks.

Quote
As for wall vs rock for ways, well quite often ways are dug into the rock so to me it looks better having this showing.
You are right but sometime it is better if there would be wall instead rock. Mostly if it is above sea or above else transportation construction. For example, on level 1 you may have water canal - and road in level 2 or higher - in the same direction.

On other hand, rock may need new graphics, because rock with current structure (of current texture) is not fully solid.

Chybami se člověk učí - ale někteří lidé jsou nepoučitelní

isidoro

As far as I can remember, in Chris Sawyer's Locomotion, the player was able to build arbitrary tall cliffs...  They looked weird, but it was playable...


kierongreen

Just checked and indeed you can - though it's quite easy to produce tiles which are inaccessible. Also after having debugged simutrans altering tile height tools I've noticed the Locomotion ones produce errors in tiles mismatching quite frequently...

I still say there's not a huge need for this but if anyone wants to change it it's now just a couple of numbers to change in simwerkz.cc - wkz_setslope_t::wkz_set_slope_work as the display code supports arbitrary height cliffs:

if(  diff_from_ground > 2 * max_hdiff  ) {
return "Maximum tile height difference reached.";
}

Change the two if's to if(  diff_from_ground > 4 * max_hdiff  ) for example or just remove them completely et voila....

Markohs

That can ofc work, but there is no warrantee the slope is correctly displayed when you move the camera north-west (i.e, the fundament it's outside the view but the slope is not. If the height difference is too big, it will not be drawn, simutrans just considers a few extra tiles, I guess the current limit is enough for displaying high buildings, I'd say maybe 4 heights over the fundament, but didn't checked the code to verify this.

kierongreen


Markohs

Quote from: An_dz on June 06, 2013, 04:17:08 PM
1 cliff is almost 2,5 levels. 2 cliffs is a 5 level building. A wall this big already struggles to battle gravity and for sure will collapse soon, to me it's kind of a reality limitation.
Quote from: kierongreen on June 07, 2013, 12:54:38 AM
Indeed - personally I don't see a reason to increase this.

I think there is no reason to keep discussing over this, we have had reasonable responses to this issue. I'd say there is not much more to talk. ;)



ӔO

grand canyon, table top mountains, Huangshan, etc...

not that those places have transport running through them.

what might be nice is the requirement of building hairpin turns or switchbacks to scale mountains. Like the alps or india's Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.
My Sketchup open project sources
various projects rolled up: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17111233/Roll_up.rar

Colour safe chart:

Ters

Those cliffs are two levels high with pak64 at least.

But it doesn't matter if no one can get Simutrans to have higher cliffs without breaking lots of stuff.

kierongreen

Double heights may make hairpin turns viable. It depends whether the speed reduction imposed by steep slopes is greater than that of 2 90 degree curves (and that the surrounding landscape would mean severe engineering would be required to make a straight ramp long enough to smoothly ascend a hill).

I'd say it's not so much breaking lots of stuff as making the landscape more difficult to use. Also tall cliffs would necessarily look that good either.

Take the attachment as an example of a canyon. Higher cliffs would make building routes more difficult as you wouldn't see some tiles at the bottom of the canyon. If the height difference is too great the entire canyon becomes hidden. Also notice how while the landscape as a whole has smooth shaded tiles cliffs are all completely flat - greater height would emphasise this.

Something I think can be considered is different natural and artificial slopes for different climates. Having a sandy cliff texture could easily improve the look of a scene like this.

Fabio

imho cliffs 3 and 4 tiles high would look much better with dedicated images.
also, I wish the map creation would build some natural vertical cliff as well.

Sarlock

Part of what I am playing with for pak128 is a set of natural looking slopes.  It's a lot of work and they are only for a single height rise... the sheer amount of graphics required for all of the different slope combinations and climates makes it quite time consuming.  With half heights, this complicates it future... if you want slopes to cover single and double height rises, you'd need a lot of different images.  If you want to make slopes for 3, 4 and higher cliffs it would add even more images.
It's really only feasible for if/when a 3D version comes out and these slopes can be computed at run-time rather than hand drawn individually.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

Markohs

As part of the world limits patch, I have to create world slopes. Whoudn't be too hard to extend it so it can create all the required slopes from a lightmap and a texture, we'll see.

Ters

That is one of the lesser worries, as we developers could just push that burden over onto the artists.

Heinz

I don't see how the maximum difference in height between two tiles is restricted "by the way terrain is stored".
If you load a relief map with a low sea level and enlarge the map ingame, the new terrain will be random and will have a sea level = 0 , so there is a very high cliff between your relief map and the new area.

Leartin

Quote from: Heinz on April 02, 2019, 08:07:45 AM
I don't see how the maximum difference in height between two tiles is restricted "by the way terrain is stored".

This thread is 6 years old, so it might not even be the case anymore. However, there are certainly some issues. I remember a five-layer-wall would cause graphical glitches in pak192 due to overflow error; While that was fixed, chances are pak256 reaches the same glitch with six layers - metaphorically speaking.
One thing to consider is that anything too far to the southeast of the viewport won't be rendered. Since very high walls would allow very high mountains that would be seen very far northwest of their location, it would cause headaches.