Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Hey, I don't know if anybody noticed this back when I was doing the gems and gem-like weapons, but if you set an area to interior, even if it exterior, you can get things which are transparent or glowy to look better. I was trying to figure out if that is based on the module-area settings or the tileset SET file settings. I need to play with this some more, because I am trying to figure out some other shadow-related stuff related to interior settings as well.

 

Edit: Oh sure, now I can't find what I was playing with before. Anyway, I had made it so items with self-illumination were more vivid underground or in places defined as interior. I could go up to a cityscape and the items self-illumination were totally turned off. How did I do that.

 

Nevermind. What it appears I was seeing was shadow being cast on self-illuminated objects. Simply turning off sun-shadows fixed this. The appearance of self-illuminated objects is much darker than it should be if the object is actually illuminated. Basically shadow should not affect self-illuminated objects, but it does, and it is applied AFTER the illumination on the object, rather than the object being re-illuminated after shadow. This generally is another hit against environment shadows in my book.

 

Turning off sun/moon shadows in the environment setting panel of the area, I was able to see the difference for this tileset with and without shadows, and I am thinking more and more that it look better without. Furthermore, when you hold a light casting object against environment shadow casting objects, it does not get drawn out like placeable shadow meshes, or characters. This is a very unfortunate, and visible, setup in my book. Just another eye-sore. Perhaps it is best to leave shadows out of tilesets? I was really hoping to find some way to make the tileset objects cast shadows as placeables, but I may have to resort to adding features as placeables to accomplish such things.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

OTR pointed out the possible need to clear up some toothy looking parts where the tiles kind of part their hair. If you look at the current tiles, while it is taken down a bit from the first release, you can see at the edge of one terrain texture and the next, there is a visible jagged line. I intended to leave that and then put a hairy shaggy grass texture extrusion over it, as most tilesets for the out of doors tend to do.

 

But this might be a bit too conspicuous, even with such a thing done. So what I am proposing to do is change my tile division script in a way that it examines the number of edges shared by verts on a triangle. If the triangle shares only one vert with any other triangles of the same texture, then it will be transmuted to the other texture. If it shares two verts, it then needs to determine what to do by the number of other faces sharing the same verts. It it determines that the number of shared verts puts it more in touch with the other texture, it will flip, otherwise it will ask the surrounding faces to possibly flip to make a more smooth line across the mesh.

 

Hopefully, this will be sufficient in creating a useful line from which I can extrude (via script of course) that entire unbroken edge. Given a specific angle and width of the extrusion, I should be able to duplicate the grassy shag from the OC rural tileset. It will also shore up some obvious geometry issues in other places.

 

Another thing I would like to do is purposely keep a few of the loose triangles around, so that there are splotches of grass purposely growing right out of the stone faces. If you view a few of them now, you can see there are single triangles, or larger polygons, which the above mentioned script methods might erase. In these cases, it might be more beneficial to detect if they are pretty much floating far away from that intended boundary line. If they are, they can be visually rounded by tessellating the single triangle into 4, selecting the center triangle, and then scaling that triangle in such a way as to make a hexagon from the original triangle, and then relax the whole thing back down to nearly match the underlying walkmesh. That is much closer to a circle, or oval, and will be more accepted by the eye, I think. It also makes the shape conform to the other script idea if it runs twice on the same tile.

 

Just to list what this set still needs, for my own use later:

 

• script to pick decal locations, clone them off, raise them, and apply a nice decal texture


• script to determine which faces are over 27 degrees and which are over 54 degrees, for better walkmesh control


• script to locate hard edges which could benefit from a decal, shrub, or alternate smoothing


• If walkmesh is made to use non-walk surfaces, a script to save a dummy node defining the path-node selection for the SET file.


• script to slice water planes into the walkmesh (optional)


• script to slice water planes into the visible mesh, separate the mesh(es) at that point, and color anything X cm over the water level with a wet stone/sandy grass, while coloring everything below water with either mucky rock, or wet gravel debris


• script to detect faces which use tverts at or near 45 degrees from one of 6 cubic face coordinates. It should then retexture those faces in a 45 degree tilted cube. This ultimately textures the object in the shape of a 26 sided die (look 'em up, they're multipurpose). The benefit over spherical or shrink wrapping a texture is the lack of stretching caused by radian math. The drawbacks are the same: faces textured to something they should not be. I've tried the custom wrapping method in Gmax which seems to use face normals in a spherical grid, and I don't like the unattached feeling of that one. I may need to make my own wrapping method using face normals.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

Initial observation of the addition of the grass.  To my eye, the big wavy stalks give the impression that this less a rugged black hills / mountain set, and more of a rural--if a bit hilly--environment.  Before, the eye could be fooled that a canyon was expansive, but the addition of the grass makes everything just seem a lot smaller.  Does anyone else have that impression?  Maybe it's just the grass texture itself, or the scale of it, that looks a little bit out of place to me for this set... 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Without the other plant types on the hill, and the more brown texture for pine needle covered hills on slope 2 and 3, it definitely looks weird to me. But its just an intermediate stage. It reminds me more of the summertime up in the bighorns where you have the combination of tall grasses with tiny tundra things, plus the rocks showing. Right now, you can still grab the v3 without grass if you reinstall the "Full" zip.

 

The plant covered variety is going to be a lot more confined feeling, which is why having both is a plus. Right now the grass covers faces which are up to 45 degrees above a zero plane. When I get this vegetated one done, grass will only be on faces up to 27 degrees over zero. Any slope higher than that will only have odd plants and pine needles under ponderosa pines and spruces.

 

From 28 to 54 I plan to have walkable steep faces, covered at least to 45 with pine needles, with 45 to 54 being rocky debris, probably in slate-looking forms, or boulders taken from the surrounding granite. I'm thinking less flat boulders should be placeables rather than on the tile. Flat ones can be on the tile if you can walk on them.

 

I'm going to leave 0 to 27 completely free of trees, but offer up the same trees from higher slopes as placeables, that way you can personally cover flatter areas with pines, spruces, oaks, and aspens, as your area needs. Areas from 28 to 54 will have trees growing right out of the walkmesh surface. I'll then leave 54 to 90 treeless except for placeables you can jam in cracks, or make L-shaped arms coming out of the rock faces. I plan to offer at least 100 trees combined, if not doing 101 trees for each species. Variety is good, and script-built variety is super simple. Offering that many in a single package may sound overkill, but allowing people to look through a visual catalog and then pick, by filename, which ones they really want to use in their placeables.2da, is a much better goal. So if I do a package of 50-100 each: black hills spruce, scrub white oak, Colorado aspen, and ponderosa pine, that should help me get the variety filled black hills environment I am looking for. I'll do another half that each: beetle-killed pine, and fire-killed pine. A portion of the black hills spruce options will be moss covered, or mossy and mostly dead at the same time.

 

For ground cover placeables, I have these picked out to cover the plain but noisy ground: dirt path, crushed granite like from a mine, tailings piles also from a mine, wildflower collections and singles, sections of stacked limestone and stacked mine chunks for use as walls, but not as an on-tile wall.

 

Instead of putting them on-tile, I've also decided to do some red sandstone and yellow limestone outcrops as placeables which cover 1/3 to 1/2 of the base of a cliff. I'm going to make them wedge shaped, so that the majority of the smaller wedge section is inside of the hill, but if you use it away from a hill, it makes a slanted wall shape. I'll probably end up doing schist and gneiss outcrops the same way, instead of adding visible options for the cliff walls.

 

I've also decided to go with placeable granite spires of various widths. If I do about 25 variety, they can be used up the side of a slope, placed directly out in the open, or buried any distance into the ground and serve multiple purposes.

 

Tomorrow I may start work on the road tiles. They'll be the easiest to start and finish, and will give me an idea of what I may need to change for streams.

 

If the ideas from roads don't pan out for streams, I will start up a test on streams using only tile diagonals. It will be a system of streams much different than people are used to, but I think it can be very interesting looking, and will save a lot of time for the builder to just plot points this way rather than using a crosser. What I am thinking is to allow only any two corners on a tile to have a stream terrain. If only one corner is stream terrain, it knows the stream has only touched on that location, and should not show much stream. If two corners are used, the stream must go from either 0 to 0, or 1 to 0, or maybe even 2 to 0, in relative corner elevations. This substantially cuts the number of tiles which can have streams, and cuts the ridiculous work of making all-things-possible down to a workable collection. I'll then release stream combo group tiles, so you choose exactly where a stream comes together, or flows underground, or comes out of a crack, or whatever, instead of letting the stream be open-ended while drawing, or accidentally draw to just where ever you drag your mouse. My guess is this adds less than 250 more tiles total, and hopefully even less. The script gods will be able to tell me. Below are the combos I'm coming up with so far for trails and streams using this method:


where x is >0:

00xx: two options x-x right and left (11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44) [=16]

 

where x is >0:

0xx2: one option 2-0 (11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44) [=16]

 

where x is any number:

0xx1: one option 1-0 (00, 01, 02, 03, 04, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44) [=25]

 

where x is any number:

0xx0: one option 0-0 (00, 01, 02, 03, 04, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44) [=25]

 

82 or less with duplication from previous sets? I can live with that.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

Love your plans for the above.  You're even doing beetle-killed pines?  Those damn things went through our trees like a buzz saw.  Now, a horde of giant beetles to kill among the pines may just be therapeutic for their little cousins killing more than a hundred of our trees. 

 

When you do your final release, are you planning an optional "no trees" set?  It would work great for an above tree line set as well.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

How are you going to deal with scree? As placeables, built into tiles or crossers? Or no scree at all?

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               

the good thing about using crossers for streams and such is, among other nice things, that you can click/drag the mouse to paint the crosser over a 3 tile combo and being able to place even if the two tiles needed for each of the two tiles crosser variations used to paint without the click/drag trick are missing. of course this has a con when you start to use the eraser and you get a lot of your crosser chain deleted or some wrong tile crosser variation appears because the needed tiles are missing but overall its a great feature for crossers not everyone knows it (i learned from lord of worms tilesets, not sure if any of the bioware ones has such "hidden" crosser variations)

 

on the other hand i am curious about the results md will accomplish with a terrain setup but it looks undoable to me, at least from a builder point of view going after the green light hovering on a very complex height built terrain. the strategy there should be shaping the rocky terrain along with the stream. and once you're done do not touch it anymore because it will too much difficult to adjust. crossers on the other hand require not many variations and are easy to paint

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Love your plans for the above.  You're even doing beetle-killed pines?  Those damn things went through our trees like a buzz saw.  Now, a horde of giant beetles to kill among the pines may just be therapeutic for their little cousins killing more than a hundred of our trees. 

 

When you do your final release, are you planning an optional "no trees" set?  It would work great for an above tree line set as well.

Definitely going to have a naked set and a shrubby set. That way the naked set can be used for whatever, including trees other than mine. The shrubby set will have all trees and plants parented by a dummy node you can then make script for which to swap model parts, basically letting you wipe or replace aspects of the tileset. I'll probably provide that script as well, and I'll probably do it both in MaxScript and as a command line tool, which you can specify a file containing model code for the replacement values. Shouldn't be too hard for command line. Super easy for maxscript.

 

This is what I'm doing for dead pines.

 

https://www.google.c...t/data=!3m1!1e3

 

And this is what I'm doing for burnt pines.

 

https://www.google.c...!7i13312!8i6656

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

How are you going to deal with scree? As placeables, built into tiles or crossers? Or no scree at all?

 

TR

Scree in the igneous areas of the black hills comes in three forms.

 

The first form is granite with the feldspar eroded away, leaving chunks of quartz from small pebbles up to a few inches across, which may include mica disks, so it should have a certain sparkle. That will be represented by a combination of floor decals for flat areas, as well as 3d placeables for use on slopes. Coincidentally, this similar shape, but different color, is the same as crushed granite from mines.

 

In the area of Sunday Gulch, where water constantly removes and decays finer grains from the ground level of pegmatites, it creates a concave region at ground level, while covering the nearby ground with granola-like jagged pebbles. The remaining wall section is equally granola looking, but is larger grained. It often shows 3-4 inch chunks of pure minerals, with great crystal faces. The higher walls away from the water movement, and away from ground-covering snow and ice, are only weathered chemically by rainfall, and those take on a very smooth and greasy look. They erode millions of times slower, and are often glass-smooth, allowing you to look through quartz and clear feldspar crystals to what is inside the rock.

 

https://scontent-dfw...b1c&oe=56C524AD

 

 

IN the picture above, the black line represents the side profile of the sunday gulch granite. The red line indicates where the top of granite is cracked and pried apart by ice and tree roots. The ice-blue region is the part that is often glass-smooth. The outside blue-lavender line represents the usually lichen covered region. Purple is an area where under-erosion is about 50/50, and where mosses and dangly mineral growths can form. Brown is where the pegmatite is coming part in large jagged chunks. Gold is where the chunks fall and continue to decay. The green area is a safe place for gulch plants to grow, and is usually composed of mica flake and sand. Basically granite scree doesn't fall very far at all from the host rock, unless the undercut is so deep that the entire boulder the size of a house just simply falls off and cracks into multiple giant shards.

 

Check out this area of Sylvan Lake. It looks green in this google maps photo, but since it was wiped out by bugs over the last 10 years, there are almost no trees, and therefore all the pine needles have washed away. The ground is now gray, brown, and peach colored and looks more like an old mine. Both sides of this hill are now almost entirely bare, and the scree ranges from large rounded granite, down to less than a foot diameter jagged feldspar chunks, all packed tightly together with weathered quartz, and mica sand. When we were there, we found a hole in a granite wall, much like a house wall with a window cut out. I had never seen this before because it was hidden by trees. I suspect most people had not seen this rock in 50 years. Fascinating how things change so quickly.

https://www.google.c...t/data=!3m1!1e3

 

This was taken on the same spot when it was green. Now it looks like a sun-bleached wasteland, and all the trees are totally gone.

 

https://scontent-dfw...858157386_o.jpg

 

The second form is separated platelet schist. This comes in various sizes, and the majority of schist in the black hills is locally flat shale-looking stuff, but as hard as quartzite. These will be represented by placeables which lay flat, and jagged "boulders" of multiple layers of different sizes, pointing in different directions. Much of the schist in the black hills has layers of blood red and rust colored quartz which fills between certain layers, and is known to commonly be from the height of a pebble up to a few inches. Much of the schist in the keystone are is high in mica in one direction, high in rust in another direction, and dark blue gray in another direction. Whatever face is up is often covered in blue-green lichen. Faces pointing north are often covered in pumpkin colored lichen. I've constructed a texture which accounts for all six colors required to properly portray the schist over Harney Granite (lichen, pumpkin lichen, rusty dirt, bloody quartz, silver and gold mica, and slate blue). Because nearly all of the smaller plates lay flat, those can be displayed as decals on more flat surfaces, and since they often embed themselves in the topmost layer of the soil, and become partially covered with pine needles, that makes a perfect opportunity for those decals. The larger boulders fall off the uplifted sections and strike the ground at different angles, or otherwise roll as the soil changes around them. That means I need lots of big schist boulders which point in random angles. Since the schist chunks will land into soil, and be partially submerged depending on where you place them, I can just randomly rotate the boulders and you can choose to use any cardinal facing on the x/y plane to make one boulder look like 20+ depending on your placement. I figure I need 5 boulders of each of a few different sizes to round out the schist placeable selection, as well as about 10 decal textures. I was thinking to do the decal positions in two ways. You can use the flat decal placeable on flat parts of the map. Because there are so few flat places, and you won't see most of them properly if you place them on the sloped ground, I was thinking to also include pre-existing decal overlays on the tile. If you want an area which is high in schist, you include the texture in a hak or place it in your override. If you don't want the decal to show, you supply a transparent texture. Alternately, I can supply a texture which can be mirrored over Y to provide a yes or no for on-tile schist, where one half the texture is colored, and the other is transparent. For an idea of what schist scree might look like, check out google maps at this very special location:

https://www.google.c...t/data=!3m1!1e3

 

I've never been to that specific location, and didn't know about it until I was house shopping on that road.

 

Here is another common appearance of schist in the Keystone area. Note how the rock goes up hill toward the center of the granite dome. When portions are removed by weather in the direction of the dome, the rocks fall down into the hole and land at random angles, and stay in chunks as large as a house.

 

https://www.google.c...!7i13312!8i6656

 

https://www.google.c...h/data=!3m1!1e3

 

Here is an image showing a schist outcrop, which I intend to use to model some wall-like schist:

 

https://scontent-dfw...787&oe=56C82DBF

 

I've got hundreds of pictures of the area near that outcrop. That is just a tiny one.

 

The third type of scree is mine discard. This is almost entirely high quartz pegmatite, and comes in pink rose, stark white, 50% transparent white, high-lithium black, mica-rich silver, and high-potassium pink-orange. A single texture could easily cover all the bases here. Mine discard comes in size from pebble to chunks the size of a car, or larger if you count collapsed entrance chunks. I need to keep the size of chunks to a game-reasonable size, which is counter to what you'd see in real life. This means I need to make chunks small enough that the user will not constantly put them over a tile boundary, because that will lead to pathing false-positives, allowing the PC to walk through solid rock. I figure I can get away with 50 boulders in various sizes and colors. Half of those can be mine tailing piles and stacked stone walls, where the base is pebble sized texture, topped with larger rocks, and finished with medium rocks. For an example of the large-but-uniform scree in the black hills, check out the base of Mt. Rushmore.

 

https://www.google.c...t/data=!3m1!1e3

 

For a more realistic pile, check out various mines around the Keystone area.

 

https://www.google.c...t/data=!3m1!1e3

 

Other than schist, scree does not naturally form in the igneous sections of the black hills, but since the base rock of this set is igneous, and not the metamorphic schist, I need to not have it as a tile-based option, except in special conditions.

 

I won't be using this set for sediment-based mountains because the height of rises is wrong. If or when I get the limestone canyon set finished, the rocks there will be more square and jagged. Scree will be few inch thick plates of limestone, sandstone, and shale, rather than round boulders. Since the set will be based on the same rock which will make up the scree, the scree will be on the tile. Like the black hills reminiscent set in Granitelands, the limestone canyon set will not be a high tileset, as much as a low tileset with high edges, so you won't see places which represent high himalayan mountains completely covered in scree, like some stone carpet. You'll see very sharp, very high, not at all walkable, walls of 3-4 colors of limestone coming directly out of a floor tile, or a slightly raised tile. Scree will form in the concave corners of those tiles, while house-sized dropped sections will form on the convex corners of those tiles (or technically be on adjacent tiles). What I want to do in that set is keep a height transition of 150 and 300 and mix those, then supply a surround terrain type which is sheer cliffs. Since you won't be able to reach the surround terrain, I can make it very high. I can also supply a +1 on surround terrain without having to worry about walkmesh inconsistencies, or visual perfection/shadows/etc. With this I can portray both the Spearfish Canyon, with it's shallow rapid river and square shaped valley, or recolor it to portray the much deeper Black Canyon of the Gunnison, with it's more U-shaped valley, and much deeper river system.

 

https://www.google.c...t/data=!3m1!1e3

 

Here's pic of the pumpkin lichen on some granite chunks way up high

 

https://scontent-dfw...607&oe=56854F94

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I've been puzzling out the stream setups, and I get these three options:

 

One is of course common crosser practice, but with a twist. The streams would:

1. go from 0-0, as well as 1-0, as normal

   
2. between any two edges which are +0 or +1 in relation to each other

   
3. which will total 44 tiles, not including similar tiles where one or two corners are 2-3,2-4,or 3-4

   
4. plus another 32 for half active tiles

   
5. and would require extra 3-way stream forks on many tiles

This is fairly self explanatory, and only slightly increases the need for stream tiles over normal stream tile implementations. This would work as any normal crosser, going from midpoint of any edge, to the midpoint of another edge. It has the drawback of being square looking, even if implementation tries to be rounded.

 

The second setup works at a terrain type and would:

1. go from 0-0, 1-0, or 2-0

   
2. along edges or diagonals

   
3. where we'll call the lowest corner the base corner A, the diagonal from it point R, and the left and right corners from the base point we will call X and Y (it's a trig thing)

   
4. and will have an option for A-X when X<=R

   
5. and will have an option for A-Y when Y<=R

   
6. and will have an option for A-R when R<=X and R<=Y

   
7. and will have an option for X-Y when X,Y,and A are zero

   
8. which will total 31 tiles, not including similar tiles where one or two corners are 2-3,2-4,or 3-4

   
9. plus another 38 for half active tiles

   
10. and would not have stream forks

This should be fairly simple to implement, but I doubt I can pull it off via script without more work than is needed to just make the tiles. Since water would flow down only the lowest points of the tile, and would be at the edges, this is the most accurate option visually.

 

Instead of drawing from edge midpoint to another edge midpoint, this method allows you to plop down a stream connector terrain at any supported corner. From that corner, the stream will just kind of pool at the placement corner on all adjacent tiles. You then draw another stream connector at another corner of the same tile, which has to be supported by the system, and it will draw a stream from point to point. Streams flowing downhill will have slightly different and more active textures than flat terrain streams. Placeable decals will exist for flat terrain streams so you can specify a direction and speed of the water. In games where water texture does not translate, displaying a flow direction via texture animation, this is how newer games tell you which direction water is moving, by placing decals over the water mesh which animate in a direction, but only a little here and there, rather than the entire mesh. They let your brain imagine the rest.

 

This option is no more difficult than crosser-style stream placement. It simply uses corners instead. Compared to edge-to-edge connectivity, this corner-to-corner connectivity has the same possible number of options, but are just calculated in a different way. From any edge, you can traverse to 3 other edges. From any corner, you can traverse to 3 other corners. The only difference is the elevation decisions, making it so water never flows uphill, or choose a path which is more resistant over one which is easier.

 

The third option is similar but requires/allows a few more tiles, and therefore would require a lot more half active tiles. I detailed that one yesterday.

 

Of all the options, I prefer the second listed here, primarily because it looks more real. Second to that, I can perform stream forks at any supported corner, and it automatically can split up to 3 ways, as long as the adjacent tiles are supported. If additional tiles are calculated, it can split to 4, same with the crosser method. It naturally changes direction at either 90 or 135, and forks at 90 or 135, whereas normal crossers curve at only 90 and fork at 90. It may seem more rigid, but it actually offers more realistic options.

 

If the number of tiles is doubled, option 2 can portray a meandering stream which snakes right and left over the length of at tile, rather than flowing in a straight line. The same can be said of crosser type streams.

 

Option 2 also offers a different left and right side of the stream at any combination, where crosser methods require multiple varieties to achieve the same level of variation. Doubling the selection of stream models in option 2 quadruples the variety, because you have the options for AA, AB, BA, and BB stream side combination.

 

Below is an image which shows the difference between edge-to-edge (pink) and corner-to-corner (green) where the tiles are flat. Keep in mind that corner to corner can do things edge to edge cannot when used on mountainous areas. It also shows where green can apply variation, and where it cannot, in relation to pink. This shows that green cannot vary much on straight away sections, while pink can. Pink cannot vary on turns as much as green can on diagonals.

 

 

There is a 4th option for the future, but I won't bother calculating it now. That option combines a crosser and a corner option, allowing you to switch between edge-to-edge and corner-to-corner streams, which would allow you to make really sharp, or really smooth direction changes and splits, basically offering up to 5 realistic exit directions in relation to any one entry direction, whereas we now have 3:1.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Here's an album showing some of the texture goals for the finished set

 

http://imgur.com/a/hF5nB

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Last night and this morning I spent some time wrapping a script around edge-to-edge stream creation. It has some issues. The first being that there are 419 tiles it picked out that need streams put on them. That does not include half-active tiles, or variants of such. That's a problem for me because I don't think that this many tiles is required for a good stream.

 

I found that I can easily automate streams on edges, but I can't seem to get gmax to play nice on streams on diagonals. Diagonals were going to be a huge part of the system, so that is really a bummer. The problem comes up when I try to carve one object with another. Problem one is that you cannot carve a paper-like object and expect good results. The carving object will basically rip a hole in it. So what you have to do is extrude the object and turn it into a 3d volume, and preferably have it closed to outside regions. This makes carving easy and error free. The second problem occurs when you try to then calculate which of the faces needs to be removed. I tried a short version where I paint the faces I don't want after carving to a material type which is useless on the tile, like sand or snow, expecting I can select by material id after carving and just delete those faces. Not true. The third problem is introduced when carving multi-material objects, because union, intersection, and difference functions on meshes also calculate the same for the material references. In doing this, the material handler in Gmax breaks and destroys the material-to-face setup on the mesh, making it so I can no longer delete those faces.

 

I may try using face smoothing groups instead, or otherwise paint the verts to be deleted with a vert color. Something might work.

 

But I'm still worried about that 419 tiles. This only included fully fleshed out stream tiles. For every one of those, for every one of those I need approximately 1/3 as many half-tile streams, where only one corner is "streamed". We're talking nearly a 50% increase in tiles over what this set has so far, just to include a single stream type. I don't think that is worth it.

 

So to stop this nonsense, and just move forward, I'm contracting the scope of streams. I'll report back as I get the data sorted out.

 

Test 1:

restricted water fall from 2 levels to just 1: 373 tiles

 

Test 2:

water falls from 1 only, restricted water from moving into a lake or stream via normal tile (with future stream-to-water tiles being added as groups): 87 tiles

 

Test 3:

water falls from 2 and 1 as before, but no stream-to-water connection: 121

 

Test 4:

edge-to-edge instead of corner-to-corner, water only falls from level 1, no stream-to-water: 200

 

Test 5:

edge-to-edge, water falls only x1, stream shares no space with hills except 0001, no stream to water: 10 tiles

half-tiles to complete this set: 17

additional tiles to connect water: 20 and 40

total super basic crosser stream: 87

 

Test 6:

streams done as single tile groups in the form of edge-to-edge streams, without using a crosser: 30 tiles, no half-tiles, and includes connecting to water

 

Test 7:

corner-to-corner, water falls only x1, diagonals only on flat tiles, no stream to water: 72

 

Needless to say: I am not happy with the results so far. If I have to do any large quantity of physical work on this, streams won't be getting done before winter. If I can fully automate it, I will go for highest quality, even if that bloats the tileset x2.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               

can't you just do the 0011 0022 0033 0044 values for the stream terrain and work out the diagonals for the height change with a few groups?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I could, but I'm looking for a stream complexity which matches the tileset complexity, as well as puts the stream in the correct location, which standard crosser types won't do.

 

I started working on the automation script about two hours ago, and have it almost done. With it I should be able to fully automate the stream creation process at the highest quality options by about two days from now (to test bugs).

 

The only bug in the script at the moment is some random face deletion when trying to delete faces around the edges. It is picking up faces in the center along the new diagonal cut. Not sure how that works, especially since the faces in the deletion list are not what is shown. There are no modifiers in the stack, so it should be getting only the faces on the mesh base. Once I figure that out, I can stream cut any tile with the click of a button.

 

Edit:

 

seems to be a bug in meshop.deleteFaces when you use the delIsoVerts:true option after doing a bunch of vert movement. The verts set to faces is apparently stored in two places, and this function uses the wrong group. By deleting the verts left behind by deleted faces, it selects verts recently added instead, even after doing an update call on the mesh. I may try using the other mesh within the model.

 

Edit:

 

fix found. setting delIsoVerts to false, and then immediately calling meshop.deleteIsoVerts on the same object does the trick as required.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]