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Messages - SophiaThe3rd

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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.

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On second thought, WAY easier to do this through texture IDs or textures.png than through world.dat

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Based on the image you provided, I recommend a quick test edit to swap world.dat "med. elevation" texture with "low elevation" texture. I think this might give a more smoothed cinder aesthetic.

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: March 06, 2019, 06:15:22 am »
Fear not, I do intend to sit down and write out a documentation of the entire process and revelations ive had along the way. In the mean time, huge thank you to all the devs and community that make things like this possible in the first place. If only system shock saw this kind of love...

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: March 06, 2019, 02:05:33 am »
screen cap of Asia

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: March 06, 2019, 02:04:00 am »
intermediate data? something specific? there isnt much in the way of incremental versions i'm afraid.. so far anyway. Most of whats done thus far is a massive upshot of polys and their placements. I didnt think that a version with the Americas done but Africa and EurAsia not,per se, would be terribly useful to anyone.

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: March 06, 2019, 12:07:30 am »
Work had slowed some these last few month while i sorted things out, but nevertheless I have hit what I consider to be another milestone. The entirety of the globe is rendered with coastlines, lakes, flatlands, hilly/mountainous areas, steep mountain, ice flows and polar caps. A LARGE number of fixes and adjustments have been made to combat the significant amount of overlaping polygons in previous versions. Not completely eliminated, but much more under control. Next is deciding exactly how to apply the textures to the terrains in a fashion that makes sense, is easy to modify, and produces a pleasing look to the globe. Also still to do is cleaning up some of the country polylines where coastlines have been altered. All that said, it occurs to me that this current build might be useful to someone in the future as a sort of "proto-earth" or post apocalyptic base build ready to scorch. ;)

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: August 30, 2018, 11:12:16 pm »
Found those three as well, then actually booted up current progress to confirm BEFOREHAND that there weren't any more.
I THINK  ;) this version is error free, attached below.

Couple days of good pushing and the western hemisphere is roughed out, onto Europe and Africa!


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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: August 26, 2018, 04:21:24 am »
Found the three bad polys, thanks for the spot. Only the three, correct? If it's what you want, its yours

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: August 25, 2018, 07:50:44 pm »
Work progresses on this Jovian project. I feel satisfied with the coastlines and inland water of the entire globe. Once product hits the shelves feedback is welcome and missed spots could be persuaded, but things look great with my only gripes being that Australia has weird terrain that i'm not sure is land or lake or lagoon and Canada has WAY too many lakes, most of which are frozen(?) most of the time.
That being said next comes elevation layering. As laughable as the coastlines were, the representation of flat/hilly/mountainous terrain was quite a bit shite as well. Entire mountain regions missing and such. Good or bad this means slicing up the interiors into polys small enough to mold around earths' terrains. Coastline additions pushed the count up to 7500, so this process will likely push 10k. Process is not AS slow as finessing the waterlines, but its a bit of scissors work. About 75% through the N/S Americas. This puts things at about version 0.33
Still to come will be the actual terrain type assignments coupled with texture work to smooth appearances, as well as polyline work for country borders and mission zone adjustments for zones 3 and 4 for sure; zones 1 and 2 need checking but appear to be mostly within adjusted landmasses. (will UFOs land in the water if its within the zone?,or do they find a textured poly within the zone?)
There was a recent corrupted data scare recently, so i'm backing up this progress online as well. Of course anyone is welcome to do anything with it.

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: July 31, 2018, 01:31:22 am »
Major slowdowns ensued after my tower PC burnt up, but i was able to salvage everything and transfer to a laptop powerful enough to deal with YAML rulesets over 20K... ;)
Coastlines progress, all that remains are tiny RANDOM islands, Canada's high altitude, and the poles.

OPINION QUESTION?: The poles WERE low res/low difference breaks in terrain type in the VANILLA game. They worked alright because the game wasn't very specific. It's an easy search to annual median sea ice levels on google. But, Super high (80°+) latitudes are hard to coastline... SHOULD there be A strip of #SINKABLE ocean between high pole and high Canada as in vanilla or would  earth  be more natural with  broken sea ice snugged right up to high lat polys?
TLDR: should sea ice butt-up to places that WOULD be frozen or should players be given a chance to sink a UFO they don't want to deal with?

also:
I am a little confused about rulesets as pertains to World.DAT. Options (in rulesets) like countries, regioins, etc. allow for (override/delete/replace) of  lat/lon. coordinates, but I am not sure about how to make this into a MOD instead of an Upgrade to OXC. I would love to release as many versions as necessary to accommodate vanilla players as necessary.

Still unpacking/studying Terrain Pack 4.0 to gauge available terrains vs. desired #EARTHACCURATE

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: April 21, 2018, 12:03:47 am »
Quote
Any ETA on when will you have all the polys done?

Ballpark estimate on my coastlines is around 40-ish man-hours remaining. I don't sit down to it as often as I would like lately, but I'm shooting for around June. If your new mod is better suited with a "blank slate" earth (few/only one texture) it could be made available in shorter order than my vision for this project i suspect. Bladum's geographic distribution is much improved in my opinion, and I would want that integrated already as well, even if earth was a snowball/cinder. I still don't know how I'm going to deal with the poles themselves.

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: April 14, 2018, 03:55:59 pm »
Super! I was afraid some limitation was the problem, but it appears that's not the case. The impaling poly is a simple issue of not enough vertices. A single or two point "poly" (missing the third coordinate) kinda of "draws anyway" with missing points assumed at the center of the earth or some such. Earliest versions were tested in game to ascertain the smallest features (coast/lakes) the game will draw at max zoom. Smallest of the small might not appear at lowest zoom after terrain textures bring colors to the table, but zoom in and they do show up.
If I understand correctly Hobbes, I just need to drop the number of types of terrain back to original, and it should load vanilla with improved globe, right? (for future testing/screenshots)
How to edit country border lines? Will need doing after everything else gets polish too i suppose.

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Work In Progress / Re: Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: April 13, 2018, 05:39:51 pm »
Trying to capture an in game shot as requested, game crashes on startup. Last successful in game check was back when Africa and Australia plus Eastern Asia were completed, some thousands of polys ago. Simply replacing old world.dat with new one is all that's needed to change the earth, correct?
Attached are crash log and World.dat in current state.

Quote
EDIT: something else I realized meanwhile about the high polygon count (6000) - it will be required to assign textures to all those polygons, so there might be an issue because of all the work involved.

-too true, but thats just a simple matter of click, arrow key, click, arrow key.. also, nearly all work so far is strictly inland water or coastline. All these new polys will just copy the main neighboring poly's texture.

not sure where the hold up is, any ideas/fixes very welcome.

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Work In Progress / Improving World.DAT discussion
« on: April 07, 2018, 03:42:35 am »
Players spend a significant amount of time in this game in Geoscape. Earth should look better and more accurately reflect our real world (circa. 1999) Searching the forums has led to:
Volutar's World Editor
Bladum's World.DAT
Hobbes's Area51/Terrain pack 4.X
Am I missing any?(yes i was! there is also)
https://falkooxc2.pythonanywhere.com/worldeditor

These resources make some of the changes I'm looking to see, but do little to satisfy my main concerns with the current globe, being:
Firstly, I feel the coastlines of Earth look terrible. Laughable. Land in vast areas where none exists, missing landmass and islands, and oversimplified edges.
Second, all but the very largest bodies of inland water are ignored. Earth looks very dry, and earth has MANY lakes large enough to lose a UFO and drown its entire crew.
I have therefore started using World Editor to experiment with "improving" things. That was over a year and many man-hours ago. Progress is pictured below. The Question is : "Should this be finished?" Getting this far has taken dedication, there is still more to go, especially in Canada and Greenland, where high latitudes are a pain. Then would still come the terrain distribution improvements by Bladum followed by integrating all of the terrain type improvements by Hobbes. Whew. Poly count is already pushing 6000. I welcome any and all opinions or insight. I dont think I'll finish this unless other people think it's possible AND practical. I think it looks beautiful so far, but if it breaks the game, makes it run too slow, or too drastically changes the "look" of the game then I'll shift my efforts back to other parts of the game i've had my eye on...

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