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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: March 25, 2019, 06:24:16 am »
Awesome post. Insightful and informative.
The polar regions are indeed unfinished. Currently they sit at a confirmed "stable" configuration while experimenting with my approach to polar ice flows. I have period accurate reference photos of polar ice min/max states for 1999. An issue is that at such high latitudes polys become less malleable in world editor. It's a pain, and on backburner until I hammer out the structure of my textures and terrains.
For textures.png I still haven't come down on a side of the fence for OG/TP4, but either way realism was always meant to be in the play and not on the visual. I also expect that either way the elevations so plainly visible now will be almost swept away visually by the end, but still there when it comes to crash sites.
By the time I am confidant in my framework, I think texture painting will be fairly smooth, and progress will be rewarding immediately.
I think the complexity of the interplay between the systems involved (textures.png, rulesets, world.dat, mission zones, etc..) limit the usefulness of using a world.dat replacement alone. Not advised but certainly not forbidden.
I have always meant for the final version to be properly boxed up, and able to be flipped like a light switch in the mod menu, unaffected by all other (non-geoscape) mods. To achieve this I don't see how I COULDN'T address the missionZones, polylines for borders, and city placements.
Your final blurb is forum gold. VERY useful explanation.
some observations:
the original structure is a mess when it comes to the terrains and textures. all four textures for forests share with jungles, but farms have four textures all to themselves. even polar and desert get two apiece. this jamming together is confusing at best and at worst should probably be undone, maybe by a tiny mod of its own merit.
while they share colors on the globe, forests can only occur in the north and jungles only in the south. this is just wrong and the system used to do it is of questionable usefulness at all.
Forest/Jungle texture 11 is totally unused, and is probably something that was cut for production times but more interesting is Forest/Jungle texture 6. This texture is only used twelve times in the original globe. I speculate (based on their placements) this might have been a different unfinished terrain that was cut entirely, perhaps swamps.
The MCDs for desert, forest and mountain all already have elevated terrain for battlescape use. Amending these onto farm and polar MCDs and adding some ground surface art for each gives all OG biomes both flat and hilly capabilities. A few extra mapBlocks will need to be assembled to accommodate the behavior change. Maybe a mapScript as well. For mountainous biomes I can just copy the other 5 terrains ground surface .pck art onto duplicated copies of mountain itself. Bring along a few trees, stumps, or grasses from each and BAM. Existing mapBlocks and mapScripts should transition perfectly. I suspect that much of this is already done in TP4.0, I haven't dug in that deeply yet.
When all is said and done, this mod should be easy to modify and easy to add to. It will be nearly impossible to rearrange or reorganize. Because the original structure is a mess and because I have future modders (myself and others) in mind, extra EXTRA care is being given to layout. Original programmers were much more tidy with organization on systems such as alienDeployments itemLists or the research tree. As such these various other systems were MUCH easier for me to understand and imagine improvements for. It will greatly reduce future headaches if this thing is easy to read.
Any all-new textures will require art that not only looks the part, but also wraps around on itself on all four sides. I don't know if I can do that. I believe there is ample art already available in TP4, and the texture decisions all boil down to the "look" of the globe. OG or TP4. Again, I still haven't decided. It MAY be possible to upgrade a finished OG version into a TP version(visually speaking) but only if I get the layout right the first time, as the visual elevation references i have in prep for painting will be gone after said painting.
The polar regions are indeed unfinished. Currently they sit at a confirmed "stable" configuration while experimenting with my approach to polar ice flows. I have period accurate reference photos of polar ice min/max states for 1999. An issue is that at such high latitudes polys become less malleable in world editor. It's a pain, and on backburner until I hammer out the structure of my textures and terrains.
For textures.png I still haven't come down on a side of the fence for OG/TP4, but either way realism was always meant to be in the play and not on the visual. I also expect that either way the elevations so plainly visible now will be almost swept away visually by the end, but still there when it comes to crash sites.
By the time I am confidant in my framework, I think texture painting will be fairly smooth, and progress will be rewarding immediately.
I think the complexity of the interplay between the systems involved (textures.png, rulesets, world.dat, mission zones, etc..) limit the usefulness of using a world.dat replacement alone. Not advised but certainly not forbidden.
I have always meant for the final version to be properly boxed up, and able to be flipped like a light switch in the mod menu, unaffected by all other (non-geoscape) mods. To achieve this I don't see how I COULDN'T address the missionZones, polylines for borders, and city placements.
Your final blurb is forum gold. VERY useful explanation.
some observations:
the original structure is a mess when it comes to the terrains and textures. all four textures for forests share with jungles, but farms have four textures all to themselves. even polar and desert get two apiece. this jamming together is confusing at best and at worst should probably be undone, maybe by a tiny mod of its own merit.
while they share colors on the globe, forests can only occur in the north and jungles only in the south. this is just wrong and the system used to do it is of questionable usefulness at all.
Forest/Jungle texture 11 is totally unused, and is probably something that was cut for production times but more interesting is Forest/Jungle texture 6. This texture is only used twelve times in the original globe. I speculate (based on their placements) this might have been a different unfinished terrain that was cut entirely, perhaps swamps.
The MCDs for desert, forest and mountain all already have elevated terrain for battlescape use. Amending these onto farm and polar MCDs and adding some ground surface art for each gives all OG biomes both flat and hilly capabilities. A few extra mapBlocks will need to be assembled to accommodate the behavior change. Maybe a mapScript as well. For mountainous biomes I can just copy the other 5 terrains ground surface .pck art onto duplicated copies of mountain itself. Bring along a few trees, stumps, or grasses from each and BAM. Existing mapBlocks and mapScripts should transition perfectly. I suspect that much of this is already done in TP4.0, I haven't dug in that deeply yet.
When all is said and done, this mod should be easy to modify and easy to add to. It will be nearly impossible to rearrange or reorganize. Because the original structure is a mess and because I have future modders (myself and others) in mind, extra EXTRA care is being given to layout. Original programmers were much more tidy with organization on systems such as alienDeployments itemLists or the research tree. As such these various other systems were MUCH easier for me to understand and imagine improvements for. It will greatly reduce future headaches if this thing is easy to read.
Any all-new textures will require art that not only looks the part, but also wraps around on itself on all four sides. I don't know if I can do that. I believe there is ample art already available in TP4, and the texture decisions all boil down to the "look" of the globe. OG or TP4. Again, I still haven't decided. It MAY be possible to upgrade a finished OG version into a TP version(visually speaking) but only if I get the layout right the first time, as the visual elevation references i have in prep for painting will be gone after said painting.
