Dry land below/on water level

[prissi]

Why the widening of existing gaps from rivers?

[kierongreen]

If you were trying to be strict about enforcing restrictions then I guess this would not be allowed.

Consider however the following landscape in two versions, one allowing level transitions, one forcing a dyke which only a river can pass through. The requirement for a dyke, while not that noticeable on smaller valleys looks quite unnatural here in my opinion. Also this shows that small channels leading off the lake, which at sea level would be filled with water are here dry land (see towards top of open ended valley, or behind dyke in closed valley). This is due to the way slopes and water combinations are detected - unless a dyke is required 100% of the time (even with rivers) it must work this way. It does however also complicate dyke detection code. Of course, I've no idea under what circumstances a revised map builder if implemented might automatically generate lakes, but I think that logic for it to insist on single tile wide outlets for rivers might also be difficult to code.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

One thing to bear in mind, although I hesitate to bring it up, but I anticipate that people are going to want to see hydroelectric dams somehow. Certainly, I'd love to be able to have a canyon and place a road on top of a dam, hydroelectric or not.

[prissi]

A river during creation lower the itself one tile deep into the ground. Thus, as soon as you have lakes, the river generator will automatically take care of making such a one tile outlet.

And personally, I really like screenshot 2 more. I think, given the simutrans scale, those lakes are rather huge. As such a real beach is more pleasant to the eye.

[el_slapper]

Question I didn't see asked(maybe I missed it) : will it be possible(and shall it be) to drown cities under man-made lakes?

[kierongreen]

No, code will only allow water to be raised if empty landscape (or just trees) will be flooded.

[The Hood]

I think the level transitions look really nice - it's a shame these can't be done for sea levels as the way it is currently implemented, with a +1 level rise on all coasts, it seems like a large vertical drop when many coastal areas are very flat indeed (especially in e.g. Eastern England, Netherlands etc.). Similarly with rivers - it never quite looks right to me to have rivers sitting in such a narrow, deep channel all of the time as the lower reaches of most rivers are broad, flat flood plains.

[prissi]

Just use a lower height step (like 8 or 12 pixel for pak128 britain shoudl be easily possible. Yuu "just" need the change all ways at slopes, pilalrs and tunnel entraces and the articifial slopes. Since pak128.britain is rendered, this is not completely out of question.

[kierongreen]

Playing devils advocate about those low lying areas you mention, if they have significant populations they tend to be defended with dykes, naturally they tend to be marshland which simutrans does not attempt to depict.

Personally I agree with level changes around rivers lakes and sea to some extent. However I realise there is a balance in the game that has to be struck between features and simplicity. Many details cannot be depicted in simutrans because of the design of the game - that's not to say this is good or bad, to make a playable game you need to enforce some restrictions! Simutrans (non-experimental at least) tries avoid changes which makes the game significantly less easy to use.

Level sea shores *can* be done, theoretically, either by:
*enforcing restriction that there has to be at least one flat tile between sea and slope - so that tiles never have 4 textures
*ignoring problem and putting up with graphical inconsistencies
*allowing blending routines to use more than 3 textures

I just don't think at current time any of these solutions are worth pursuing - of course if lakes get to point of being incorporated into trunk then can think about looking again - however there's still much coding, and working out exact interface before we get to that stage!

Incidentally with height steps one advantage of the current height steps being so large is that it is obvious at a glance whether tiles are at the same level, with smaller steps this is not always the case (which causes problems in games which use 3d engines).

[The Hood]

I had considered that, but it would be a massive amount of work. If double height slopes is ever supported, I might consider it - because there are other situations where steeper slopes look right too.