Building The Plains

[Legacy_DM Frayne]

               

So I’m after some advice on the best tilesets to use and/or combine for my Native American themed mod Middlewater. 

 

The game is set in a fantasy historical analogue of North and South Dakota with some neighbouring geographical elements pulled in for variety (e.g. Black Hills, The Bighorn, Yellowstone, eastern woodlands).  For the most part however it’s prairie, the banks of the Big Muddy (Missouri) river, lightly forested river valleys and the High Plains. The painters George Catlin and Karl Bodmer (links are to their landscape paintings) did an excellent job of capturing these areas in the 19^th century.

 

I’m aware that you can change the height of grass in a tileset and I’ll be using this to represent the Prairie in summer (which can be 6-8 feet in height).

 

I hardly need anything in the way of buildings but I’m currently using Castle Exterior Rural tileset to try and represent village locations as it has the ‘Barrows Entry’ and ‘Ice House’ tile groups which function as useable placeholders for Earth Lodges.  The thing I’ve found hardest to replicate so far is riverside locations like bluffs overlooking a river.  There are seacliffs in this tileset I could retexture but they have no height variation, the water is always right at their base and it doesn’t look much like a silted river.  So I’m left with THIS rather than THIS.

 

Any recommendations or musings welcome.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

You need my unfinished high plains tileset. There are some pictures mixed into the first few (maybe dozen) pages of the black hills tileset you can see in my comment footers

 

quick link

http://forum.bioware...ook/?p=19477385

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_DM Frayne]

               

Fabulous… I must have missed that page when I was looking through your thread.  Looking at your description:

 

High Plains

this is your basic grass, very similar to OC rural. It will be a tall grass or prairie setting, with a very short height transition. It will also have a river system with a very small river width, but it can cut hills of various heights with tile groups to simulate bends through softer rock layers. I'm going to stick with a near-grayscale tanish color for ground, similar to that found on the road in OC rural, but with less color. Trees will consist of scrub oak and box elder, almost entirely, with the occasional buffalo berry or something sage in color to break up the monotony. In addition to the base grass color/height/mass, the area will be filled with various wildflowers and specific grasses. High plains will feature two pond types: clean and alkali. Both will be walk-in depth. Cut height transitions, as well as alkali pools, will show badlands clay rocks as their base.

 

What about the Big Muddy eh? From my source material…

 

The 'Big Muddy River’ (the Missouri) has a peculiar terror all of its own, a restless, relentlessly foaming flood, a boiling torrent for two and one-half thousand miles from highland headwaters to its union with the Mississippi; increasingly yellow-muddied and littered with turning driftwood, cursed with sand-bars and whole trees snagged upon the bottom, all deposited by the continually collapsing alluvial banks. This freshet has cut a fertile valley through the prairie - two or three hundred feet deep and from two to twenty miles wide - along which it is bumped back and forth between the alternating bluffs of sloping lawn and precipitous, variously-coloured clay cliff.     

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I find it very hard to represent something that large or wide across without using off-map resources, like billboarding, or skyboxing. You might look to modify some of the river tiles by SEN and attach them to the high plains set. Sen's set offers flowing rivers which can be modified for direction by changing which animation is turned on in the toolset. Each of his tiles is loaded with right, left, and unmoving. In addition to streams, there is a wider body of water that can be made to look like a river, including open water tiles which can also flow. You might find those tiles interesting as is, and for use with the high plains set, all that might need to be done is texture override or replacement.

 

If you would like to represent something super flat in the center, and steeper on the edges, I would suggest using the basic rural in the valley areas. You might be able to transition from the OC rural to highlands using my high plains set. The river, as it runs from Omaha to Chamberlain, could possibly be done entirely with Sen's set. Anything above the river valley, including badlands and grasslands, my set could do.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_DM Frayne]

               

SEN... Senemenelas?  Didn't he do seasonal variation stuff as well?  Brings me on to...

 

My game is (at least initially) a closed DMed campaign allowing for the passage of time between events, linked to various activities.  This includes a seasonal migration of the party’s tribe from a Summer Village (on bluffs overlooking the Big Muddy River) to a Winter Village nestled in the shelter of a forested river valley farther west.  So I’m also looking for a tileset that can nicely represent this (not necessarily in any way related to a plains/prairie set).  

 

I’m aware of tilesets with seasonal variations.  But for my purposes this is not necessary… the imperative to leave would be clear and controlled by the weather, so I could have a series of gradually deteriorating locations (or improving, in the other direction) during the migration.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

For a good western mountain atmosphere, you might find that the coniferous forest mountain tileset might give you at least a bit of the further west feel, almost going as far as Washington or Oregon. However, it isn't a fall/winter set. You could at least portray some portions of the black hills, or even the similar hills in Montana, on your journey to wherever the migration takes your party. You might then suddenly get the expected snow overnight, after just leaving the Wyoming or Montana forest, reverting back to a winter rural setting. Enter elk hunting, or whatever you use for non-monster neutrals.