Canyons

[autolycus]

The simplest way to explain why a negative mountain is easier than a positive mountain is that you can get a long, strong rope and bridge the gap of a canyon much easier than you can tunnel through a mountain.

In game terms, if designers want an uncrossable gulf, a mountain or deep water would do just as well for some units. However, since mountain and deep water are already defined as quite easy to cross, canyon becomes necessary I guess. You might as well call it void, if only flying creatures can cross, and I would prefer gorge. Not all canyons are like the Grand Canyon.

So, back to the long-ago point, please make canyon hexes easy to identify as black pits/crevasses/gorges/voids almost too dangerous and difficult to cross by anything except a flying creature. There's hardly any way you can make them look stony without making them look like negative mountains. It has to be more intuitive to the eye. As Jetryl said, a big black hole is fine. To me this is true because it's really a big black hole, not a natural formation.

[Boucman]

I do lot of climbing, and I can tell you that going up and down a cliff isn't that simple, especially with things like armor/horses to pull through.

if the canyon is deeper than the length of the rope (standrd climbing rope is 80m, longer ropes get very heavy very quickly) you would have to stop in the midlle, attach yourself pull the rope down, attach the rope somewhere else, and go down again. You can't do this without complete climbing gear.

going up is even worth, esp if you don't have equipement, training and esp if you have some wieght to pull along.


going down a mountain is not like going down a cliff. cliffs are vertical, you need to be attached (I assume abseiling, an untrained person would never dare climbing down) you need time and equipement.

on a mountain you might have to use your hands from time to time, the climbing might be very cold, the walking very hard, but you're walking. We see people climbing on cliffs in mountains on TV but that would not be what the units are doing, they would look for known path, easy slops, avoid the mountaintops, totally different.

no. I have done both climbing and mountain trekking, and they have nothing in common.

[Christophe33]

I agree totally with Boucman. From my own limited experience of climbing and more extensive of hiking I can tell it is very different. When you go across mountains you don't needto go on the top of each and every one, you go through pass,follow area with limited slope or make zig-zag. The Alps are a ood example of pretty high mountains with valley that have been crossed succesfully by armies (Hannibal, Napoleon..). But a cliff is a shear drop that you can't cross without special competence or knowledge. Try go across the Gran canyon without using the man maid path and bridge... or rather don't . Futhermore we have been discussing including high mountains terrain that would be nearly impassable too.
The point of the canyon (later on abyss for underground) is to bring a new type of terrain. Meanwhile here is the zip file with the new graphics. They should tile far better with each other than the previous version.

[quartex]

Personally I think that this entire discussion about whether or not a unit can climb out of a chasm is rather stupid. People are trying to apply realism to the game, which is rarely a good idea becuase this is a fantasy game, and besides this terrain type was explicitly designed to be un-passable to non-flying units.

There are already issues with plague, doesn't it cause walking corpses to pop up in cave walls if there is no other space to put them into? My feeling is that any non-flying unit that appears in the chasm/canyon space should just die. But I don't think this is going to happen very often.

[Dacyn]

There are already issues with plague, doesn't it cause walking corpses to pop up in cave walls if there is no other space to put them into?

no. That's a problem with the WML-generated "plague" in Temple of the Deep, TROW.

My feeling is that any non-flying unit that appears in the chasm/canyon space should just die.

That rule would overcomplicate things just for the sake of realism, and as you just said Wesnoth is not about realism.

[Shade]

no. That's a problem with the WML-generated "plague" in Temple of the Deep, TROW.

Yes. Yes it is. I'll try to get that before 1.0

[Christophe33]

Here is a composite of canyon tiles made in photoshop to show how they tile with each other.

[Elvish_Pillager]

Much better!

[Neoriceisgood]

Neat though I see two errors, can't there be like a huge hole where the hexes go like

Code: Select all

XXX
XXX
XXX

although this would be fairly useless as you only need one line of canyon to prevent anyone from moving there, it might still look nice to have large holes.

[MadMax]

Neat though I see two errors, can't there be like a huge hole where the hexes go like

Code: Select all

XXX
XXX
XXX

although this would be fairly useless as you only need one line of canyon to prevent anyone from moving there, it might still look nice to have large holes.

I would like to see that too.

[Bander]

You could have a multi-hex canyon.

[Christophe33]

The picture wasn't a canyon built using Ayin's code but a composite made in photoshop to display most of the tiles and show how they connect. I'm not sure how Ayin's code will build a dense canyon (3x3) area since I don't have CVS but I will assune it will use the "canyon-all" version at the center then 3 way connecters witch would let little grass, thus would not look like a crossable terrain. It is of course possible to combine the tiles "by hand" to create multihex canyon for special cases.

[Ayin]

New, fixed canyons were commited to CVS.

Posting an archive of the files with the fixed names; please use this one (or the files from CVS) as a basis for future fixes; as the previous ones had incorrect names on some files.

Cheers,

Ayin

[MadMax]

Could we have canyon-to-cave transitions, to have pits?

[Eleazar]

i believe Ayin has determined that using multiple overlays for terrain won't hurt performance much. I think it would be best to do the chasm similarly.

Perhaps it should always be on a "dirt" tile base. But if we are willing to spend 3 map letters for different versions of chasm, we could have grass, dirt, and cave chasm without doing special graphics. I believe christophe33 said he was keeping the elements separate, so it should be relatively easy to do.