mountain terrain where art thou?

TuxVader · Post by **TuxVader** » June 29th, 2004, 12:09 am

When are the new mountain tiles going to be added? While playing the newest version of wesnoth, I noticed how poorly the old mountains fit in with all the new terrains. PLEASE ADD THE NEW STUFF. The old mountains really sort of ruin the look....
Why the delay in adding them? Is there some code that must be implemented? An explanation would be nice.
Maybe I'm just nuts, but that's my $.02

Post by **Sangel** » June 29th, 2004, 12:32 am

Unfortunately, the new mountains have no transition frames, and the designer (Christophe, right?) is away right now. Unless someone else completes the transitions while he's gone (don't hold your breath), it'll be a while before they're included.

TuxVader · Post by **TuxVader** » June 29th, 2004, 1:17 am

thanks for the explanation!

It's too bad they won't be ingame any-time soon, but at least there's a good reason.

Post by **quartex** » June 29th, 2004, 2:09 am

Actually I thought Christophe33 just got back from his vacation. I thought I saw a post from him recently in the User's forum.

Christophe33 · Post by **Christophe33** » June 30th, 2004, 6:39 pm

Yes I'm back from vacation. Before leaving, someone volunteered to try making some transition while I was away but it doesn't seem to have happen. So I have to do it now. The problem is not that easy since there are different type of mountain and I don't know how to use the multui-hex tiling system to code for the mountain range. I need to see how well (or bad) the transitions works but will be able to do only a partial test with random mountains tiles. The first set will be far from perfect but will be usefull for test. I also have to improve the hills transitions (and the hills color). I'm also thinking to make a "rolling plain" as a potential transition from plain to hills or mountain. I'm quite busy these days but I will try to get the mountains transition done by friday evening.

Post by **freim** » June 30th, 2004, 6:44 pm

Christophe33 wrote:Yes I'm back from vacation. Before leaving, someone volunteered to try making some transition while I was away but it doesn't seem to have happen. So I have to do it now. The problem is not that easy since there are different type of mountain and I don't know how to use the multui-hex tiling system to code for the mountain range. I need to see how well (or bad) the transitions works but will be able to do only a partial test with random mountains tiles. The first set will be far from perfect but will be usefull for test. I also have to improve the hills transitions (and the hills color). I'm also thinking to make a "rolling plain" as a potential transition from plain to hills or mountain. I'm quite busy these days but I will try to get the mountains transition done by friday evening.

I wanted to have a go at the transitions, but I just haven't had the time to work on them. I have posted some rolling hills earlier, they might be possible to adapt and use. We should have a new set of snow hills also, the old ones don't fit well with the new terrain.

cedric · Post by **cedric** » June 30th, 2004, 7:11 pm

Christophe33 wrote:Yes I'm back from vacation.

Welcome back!

--
Cedric

Christophe33 · Post by **Christophe33** » July 1st, 2004, 1:32 am

cedric wrote:
Christophe33 wrote:Yes I'm back from vacation.
Welcome back!

--
Cedric

Thanks...and I spent some time visiting mountains and volcanoes to get more ideas

Well, since my experiment got delayed, I had some time to play around with photoshop and I did the transitions. I was faster than I expected and looks to work fine in my simple test against a few other terrains. I sent all the transitions (31 since I made all the possible variants) to Cedric as well as a sharpened version of the plain. There should be no problem to combine he transition and the various mountains tile. I don't know if the code was set up to "grow" mountain ranges using the tiles I provided for that purpose. The transitions should work fine for the high mountains tiles I made. So I hope they will all be included in the next version. Like that I can correct was needs to be corrected after global testing.
snow hills are on my to-do list, as well as snow mountains: it will look weird to have snow forest and hills but not on the mountains

.
But the next thing I will do wwhen I have time is refined the hills and do hills to water transitions. Is there a need for other type of special transition with the hills?

Woodwizzle · Post by **Woodwizzle** » July 1st, 2004, 12:32 pm

They're done?! Can we see 'em? I've been waiting for these for a while now and I'm all amped =)

Christophe33 · Post by **Christophe33** » July 1st, 2004, 7:06 pm

The best is that you (and any otherpeople interested) try it. So here are the two zip files with all the mountain pictures and all the transitions. Just dump the whole lot in a separate copy of Wesnoth (images/terrain file) then edit the terrain.cfg to include all the variants of mountains images (in somewhat random order...not yet built mountain ranges so it won't be as good as it should be):
[terrain]
image=mountains4,mountains3,mountains4,mountainsA1,mountainsA2,mountains-peak1,mountains-peak2,mountainsR1,mountainsR2,mountainsR3,mountains,mountainsS4,mountainsS5,mountains-peak3,mountains-peak4,mountainsR4,mountainsR5,mountainsS1,mountainsS2,mountainsS3,mountains2,mountains3,mountains
name=mountains
char=m
Then you can look at maps using this copy of BfW. The transitions are fine but sometime look a bit silly when surrounding a isolated big mountains (a peak taking a full hex). The pictures mountains4 and mountains3 are the best for isolated mountains or mountains at the border with low lands.
Also it might be better not to have transition between mountains and hills even though it doesn't look too bad.

Post by **freim** » July 1st, 2004, 7:49 pm

The configuration has changed in the newest versions, not sure exactly from which version.

You should list just one tile in terrain.cfg, the "base" tile. All the variations and transition stuff are defined in terrain-graphics.cfg.

Christophe33 · Post by **Christophe33** » July 1st, 2004, 9:02 pm

frame wrote:The configuration has changed in the newest versions, not sure exactly from which version.

You should list just one tile in terrain.cfg, the "base" tile. All the variations and transition stuff are defined in terrain-graphics.cfg.

Arrggg... you are right. It worked with the "old" version I used but not with the .07.11 I downloaded this morning. The strange thing is that the text in "terrain.cfg" still look the same. For example there is 12 or more time "grassland". With the newest version, only one moutains image is used. I suppose the probability for each other has to be defined in a file but I haven't figure out how it works yet. Maybe someone can set up a version of this file to allows all the present images to be used. Anyway we also need a set-up for mountains range vs isolated mountains.

Post by **Ayin** » July 1st, 2004, 9:38 pm

I wrote some kind of mini-tutorial here: http://wesnoth.slack.it/?MultiHexTutorial

And yes, there is still some obsolete stuff in terrain.cfg we did not remove yet : )

Christophe33: you should not split your multi-hex mountain ranges, it's simpler to include them as multi-hex images :)

Anyway, if there are no objections, we'll include them in the game ASAP.

Christophe33 · Post by **Christophe33** » July 2nd, 2004, 12:38 am

The tiles used for the mountain ranges works well also as individual tiles and allows a far bigger diversity by adding 10 images (5 tiles with a mirror version). Having a image of a block of 5 tiles forming a range is simple but not convenient or flexible. I would prefer a system that allows to "build" ranges using the tiles to make a range of nearly any size or shape. It might be more ddifficult to set up but would be far nicer from a graphic point of view.
After looking at the transitions in the dwarven wasteland I concluded the following:
Technically they work fine, even the all around transition (for a village in middle of mountains). The north transition is quite good but could be omitted in some case. The south, northwest and northeast transition are OK, the southwest and southeast one are less good, at least when you have a lot of them. They are too homogenous, forming a bunch of little mountains lined up after the other. Solutions are to omit them in some cases (transition with hills and forest for example), redo them... and make some alternate transitions.
Is it possible to have multiple variants of the same transitions type with a probability to be selected for each image?
Cedric just informed me by e-mail that the new mountains and transitions won't be included in the version 0.8 (soon to be released) because of the problem to get a good distribution of the various mountain images. Also it is considered that some mountains and hills appear too similar to each other. I'm not convinced of that but since I made them, I can distinguish them quite easilly

.
So we will have to wait version 0.8.1 or later to get the new mountains included. It would be still good if someone use Ayin's system to get the mountains tiles distribution to work.
I'm not good at that and I preferr to consacrate my limited amount of free time at doing or redoing terrains graphics.

Post by **Dave** » July 2nd, 2004, 1:10 am

Can we get a screenshot of what the mountains look like in-game?

I am very much looking forward to them!

David