Globe variants

[luke83]

General mapmaking outline  https://openxcommods.weebly.com/general-map-creation.html

[Volutar]

832 polygons.

more detailed europe, eurasian seas/lakes, americas, oceania, japan, eurasia.

P.S. Country borders become slightly wrong
P.P.S. Due to wrong OROGINAL xcom Hawaii placement, and corrected HERE, trajectory data also should be corrected (In original xcom Hawaii islands are placed 5 degrees to the east from real position).

[moriarty]

876 polys

I took Volutar's globe and added some African big lakes, changed a bit of coastline and terrain types for Africa, Greenland and Iceland.

Maybe someone wants to add some detail to Australia and NZ?

[luke83]

Is there any limits in the amount of new Terrain Types that can be added into Openxcom? New map details is a great step , but is there a way to say , you are now a SWAMP area, you Geoscape graphic colour should look "browny blue" and  your battle scape Map Codes are stored under "Swamp1"

[Volutar]

I think there's no obvious limit of terrain types. The thing is - openxcom code should handle them somehow If it will handle swamp area (which I find nice idea) - so there should be some "yaml" parameters, like TerrainID->TextureID + Map type. So there should be function to create specific terrain map, and map block files of course.

[moriarty]

currently there's 12 terrain types, and adding new ones should be easy. of course, world.dat files with the new terrains are never backwards-compatible after that, but who cares

in world.dat it's simply a matter of changing a byte to another value (should be easy as soon as Volutar includes that in his editor). Then we need a new texture for the geoscape, which should be easy, too. then somebody needs to make new tilesets for that kind of terrain...

I'm completely in favor of doing this, which is why I started this thread some days ago. perhaps you should mention the "swamp" terrain idea there (actually, the easiest new terrain to make should probably be "tundra/permafrost". there's a whole lot of it in Russia as well as Canada, and I think a lot of the "mountain" tileset could be re-used - basically everything except the mountains themselves.)

[Daiky]

Isn't adding lakes a bit dangerous, because it's going to happen that you shoot down a UFO by accident above a lake and then loose the UFO...

[moriarty]

yes. it is. it means you have to take care where you shoot the UFO, just like before

I don't know about you, but I sometimes shoot UFOs down over the sea intentionally, because I don't want to fight yet another battlescape mission...

and I tried to only add lakes that are big enough to be seen on the lowest zoom level. BIG lakes. I'm not going to add puddles.

[Daiky]

It's maybe because the interception is not yet zooming in automatically, but while testing in openxcom it happens to me a lot.
A little switch to automatically hold fire when above water or something would help a lot in my case.

[moriarty]

hmmm, interesting, perhaps even a little display in the interception screen that shows the terrain you are currently over? of course it would only really work well once we have a working "minimize"-button

[Volutar]

Why dangerous? sometimes I wish to shot UFO down above water, just to avoid some side-effects on economy.

[MKSheppard]

You know, you could use a custom ruleset with a custom globe to create an unique game -- imagine a world in which the aliens decide to open the Alien War I (AWI) by smacking an asteroid into earth, and the resultant super-winter from all the asteroidal dust into the air has reduced the world to either arctic or desert tiles, and world population is much much lower; with fewer countries around to fund you...

[moriarty]

You know, you could use a custom ruleset with a custom globe to create an unique game -- imagine a world in which the aliens decide to open the Alien War I (AWI) by smacking an asteroid into earth, and the resultant super-winter from all the asteroidal dust into the air has reduced the world to either arctic or desert tiles, and world population is much much lower; with fewer countries around to fund you...

Absolutely

right now we are a bit limited by the country borders and cities, which are not part of world.dat, but I guess you could already do this if you find a suitable location for your asteroid crater
I keep thinking that somebody should make "winter" tilesets for the existing ones... for seasonal effects as well as "ice-age"/"nuclear winter" scenarios

[Volutar]

moriarty, I've looked into your globe. And this is what I've noticed:
1. Some new African Sea? (at western part).
2. Weirdly, but every lake has been shifted about 7 game units to the North. Why?

[moriarty]

I should probably use a different map image  the western "lake" looked like water on the image I used (I was always bad at geography, so I never noticed that there shouldn't be one), and the north shift is probably because my image isn't perfectly centered for some reason.

I used a global vegetation color-coded image, which explains the new "lake". as for the north shift, I don't know. maybe I accidentally introduced that while resizing the image? I'll look into it.