The Prestine Landscape (Terrain Works)

[ShultzCity]

Hi Lowkee.

What a great job you are doing! Can't wait to see the final product. In regards to your first post asking for feedback, I think that the textures need to be more 'scrubby' - browner? In Australia, we have dry areas near to the coast, and mostly it is patchy scrubs. Reading you last post, I can see you've started to change it to a 'drier', scrubbier look anyway.

In my cities, I like to have wide swathes of textures, such as in your screenshot in your last post. But also do not mind having patches of similar textures...

Hope this helps?

[kodlovag]

I stay to mountains with another mod from Orange which is interesting too. I don't know if he released this one. It's how look like peaks

This mountain texture would look really cool with moss instead of snow. Unfortunately I couldn't find any way to use two different rock textures for grassy and high snowy areas. So at this moment I don't have snow.

[kodlovag]

Last post I was a little overwhelmed with the scope of this process.  Yesterday I managed to get past that and focus myself at one texture at a time (now sometimes 2 or 3).  Basically I open SC4, copy the screen into paint, switch a couple textures, and repeat.

I am making some good progress with an ETA at about a month, but I want some feedback.  I have three questions for you all about this picture:


1) Do the textures change to fast?
2) Do they match each other?
3) Does this look like the hottest and driest area? (I could use desert, but I want to make these textures that you would not mind seeing at sea-level.)

Thanks

I've never experienced so fast texture change in flat terrain, but it looks good. What settings could allow this?
I think flowers had dark green base texture, so its not the possible hottest look. Am I think right, that driest has no meaning in this mod?

[Lowkee33]

I've never experienced so fast texture change in flat terrain, but it looks good. What settings could allow this?
I think flowers had dark green base texture, so its not the possible hottest look. Am I think right, that driest has no meaning in this mod?

I guess I should include grid lines with the picture because the land in there is not flat.  If I remember correctly the flowers are a gentle slope, the greener grass is a steeper slope, and the dry grass is flat.  There is about 8 textures on that shot.  I am working on making the crazy moisture variation be all year round.  I think that with the proper textures that it would be a neat "flat land" terrain mod.  Anyway, the mod looks different now.

Dry has meaning more-or-less.  There is basically a grid of moisture columns and temperature rows.  The driest column is mostly dry grass that leads to rock textures and then snow.  Now, snow is dry (frozen), but in SC4 the winter is wet.  Therefore snow must be "wet" too.  Right now I have a huge difference in moisture for north/south side of hills, so snow will also have to be "dry" to make the mod appear realistic.  I guess there is two kinds of realistic to think of, one is strict wet/dry/cold/hot and the other is thinking "well, barren rocks don't turn into jungle", I have pulled strings in both cases to make the mod "look good"

This mountain texture would look really cool with moss instead of snow. Unfortunately I couldn't find any way to use two different rock textures for grassy and high snowy areas. So at this moment I don't have snow.

The cp terrain mods have left us in somewhat of a situation.  We have No3&4, which are the standard textures, and the "rock" mods.  Terrain mods work by referencing the Instance of a texture.  The CP mods all require rock textures because the references to them are in there.  Every different rock texture set has the same Instance numbers.  Thats how it works, but it also means that we can't use two rock sets at once.  Even this project doesn't match the scope of the cp mods (as he MADE the textures), and he did such a good job that there aren't many new Instances out there.  I think it would be the ultimate compliment if years form now we were still using the same Instance sets (although I would hope we could have all 255 made).

It is possible to have your own mod, but you wouldn't be able to upload it.  You would either match Instance of the texture you want to the one you don't, delete the one you don't, and name that file to load last.  A better way would be to give the texture you want a new Instance and insert it into the Texture Map Table.

I am looking for more textures all of the time.

@shultzcity:  What mod do you use now?  For this first mod flat land will be the same texture, but yeah, not really Australia.  If you want to post some links to pictures that give me a good idea of different Australian landscapes then I will be thinking about that for a later mod.

This first one doesn't really have a place on Earth, but I am just trying to get the most out of the textures and weather.

[Girafe]

I give you more information about what I have done and plan to do. All is written on this .xls sheet

All skilifts are seasonal: winter season begins the 1st December and finishes the 1st April.
Usually ski resorts developped no under 100-1200m height. So it's for this reason I made the degressive diagramm with the different altitudes and the period where snow should appears or disappears.
Moreover I consider than a height of more than 5000m is not interesting (doesn't exist in Europe and nothing at this altitude).

All periods for each height are good for me but after I assume it's not realistic in the game and I think it's hard to do however it's what we can find in Western Europe in the alps and at this point is realistic in the reality.

Then, I consider 4 "stages" of textures (1000-1800m ; 2000-2600 ; 2800 - 3600 : 3800 +). These stages are with example of textures and flora we can find.

If you will be successful with any terrain mod, as I said previously it's important to develop mayor mod items with the textures (for adding 3D aspects).

I wait for Dedgren who is modding my pines to be sure it's possible and it's correct in the game. My pines are modded as the skilifts so (1st December to 1st April), it would be correct because no pines after 1800m.
As soon as the first mods will be release I will develop more seasonal stuffs (mostly oriented to mountains)

Only an interval of 15 days at the start but it's ok. For the end of winter no problem often pines are not covered of snow so during 1st April to 1st May they will be not covered.   

What I put it's only ideas and I don't care about difficulties and possibilities of terrain modding but I hope it could be help you.

If you need more or test some stuff, no problem 

[kodlovag]

I made my own terrain mod, and also made a simple support program to display the 32x16 size texture map graphically. It helps editing the text in the terrain ini file. I also made an image 'database' to easily search for the textures. If I remember well, CP texture set uses only the 90-FF region, and a few 8x ID for snowy textures. The game uses the 31-39 region and few others for beach, rock and map edge. I think there is a lot of free texture ID, at least 100 in a mostly continuous group, but there are free IDs in the CP range too.
Unfortunately the Pyrenean Mod has incompatible texture IDs with CP terrain files. So for my mod I modified the PTM texture IDs to be able to use them together with CP textures. Well, that means I will never be able to upload it.

My mod is basically an edited Columbus terrain mod, with using the PTM textures in its dry side. High altitudes are modified to be rocky, and no snow in it, because I selected a grassy rock texture as rock mod, and it would look funny in a snowy environment. Unfortunately it is not possible to use different rock mod for high altitudes. I could not make high cliff texture to work, or maybe it is used totally differently in game as I would like to use.

I agree, it is very hard to force the game to display the driest and hottest textures. Actually I failed with the driest. Maybe its only visible at summer on the north side of steep hills.

I will follow this topic, maybe I can help you somehow.

[jdenm8]

I just have to say... wow. Just by looking at SC4, you'd never think all this stuff was going on in the background.
I'm gonna keep tabs on this.

[Lowkee33]

@Girafe:  Thanks for the chart.  I was able to download the PTM and after a quick look it appears that some textures would match c.p. and don't have the same instance.  It would be a matter of naming one or the other to load last.

@Kodlovag:  I have been trying to make a support program like the one you made.  I am not very tech savvy so I think the best that I can do is make a Visual Basic script that excel will read, get excel to display the picture from a folder structure, and then have the folder structure include a variable as the file name.  I would then put the file name in a different cell and the correct picture would hopefully appear.  Its the VB part that I halted at, but I may look into it.  I am getting a good sense of what instances match each other anyway.

I was able to get the driest temp when I made the MoistureVariationFactor = 3.  I toned it down a little to make the seasons more fluid (and also not have snow next to desert).  I have tinkered with other variables too, but that one seems to make the moisture differences more extreme (while others dictate how much moisture there is).

The biggest help that I can think of is, as this progresses, telling me what looks good/bad/match/doesn't match etc.  I will be working on realism as this gets more fine tuned.  Right now I feel like if I can fill 10 id's per day then that is pretty good.

Which brings me to today's post... I was a little hesitant to get into Reader as I woke up, so I learned how to import pngs into SC4.  Future terrain textures should be 1024x1024 and I wanted to get an idea of how to make them.  I stretched some cp textures out and did some photo shopping (at which I am brand new to) and it works pretty good.  They looked pixel-ated at close zooms, but from all zooms the line between textures was completely unnoticeable.  With HD textures we can stretch them out more.

I got distracted with my new terrain...



Then I got very distracted...don't hit me:

[Gringamuyloca]

and what distraction!!   

I just saw the top portion of your fist pic and was already thinking Starry Night

is there anything that can't be done with this game?!   

[Girafe]

this picture is a jewel and Van gogh a genius 

[Lowkee33]

I forgot to mention about the cliffs.  The cliff texture appears on any slope that is more than a certain value.  We can set this value in the Terrain Exemplar with the property: MaxYforCliff.  For my pictures I have set this value to 0 (no cliffs).  I believe that a value of 1 would be all cliffs.

The texture I posted makes me think of city planning though.  We could set the terrain as a road map of a real city.

[kodlovag]

@Kodlovag:  I have been trying to make a support program like the one you made.  I am not very tech savvy so I think the best that I can do is make a Visual Basic script that excel will read, get excel to display the picture from a folder structure, and then have the folder structure include a variable as the file name.  I would then put the file name in a different cell and the correct picture would hopefully appear.  Its the VB part that I halted at, but I may look into it.  I am getting a good sense of what instances match each other anyway.

I wrote my program in MATLAB. I'm using it almost everyday, easiest way to make a simple support program. At least for me. My only problem that I cannot read fsh files directly, I must convert them to png first, but there are many good fsh converter here at sc4d. What would be the big jump is to read the dat files directly.

And the second image is definitely a masterpiece.

[Lowkee33]

It's been a couple days since I checked in.  I have noticed there has been a significant drop in the rate of posts on SC4D because school has started.  It is the same for me.

I got a few more moisture levels in today, but they are pretty rough as I just try to fill them in.  Sometimes things look good up close but bad from far away, and visa-versa.

@Girafe:  Today I made a quick mod based on the excel table you showed.  There are some things you should take note of as you proceed.
  1)Flat land doesn't change textures mid-month.  Moisture changes every week, but on flat land it is not enough to change textures.
  2) Moisture changes equally through the year.  Jan. is wettest, and July is driest.  Other months have a "sister" month in which moisture is equal (Feb/Dec, March/Nov, April/Oct, May/Sept, and June/August).  Therefore we can't have seasons that last from December to April (if we want 3D to match textures perfectly).  However, I did have snow match your ski lifts before, so I imagine that has to do with sloped land.
  3) With the moisture settings that I have (that maximize texture change) the snow levels and durations in your chart make for about 80% of the tiles to be snow.  For instance, the scree texture got about 6 of the possible 512 texture slots.  6 is about the amount of times to repeat a texture on the Table, but that left snow filling about 400 of them (hence the quick mod).

I will certainly be trying to tweak the variables to solve these problems, but I think the 2nd one is here to stay.  There is a time-for-complete-moisture-simulation variable, and it would be neat to have dry/wet years, but my testing has shown that the changing the variable does nothing.

[Lowkee33]

I have been able to make some good progress the past few days.  Some things that I didn't think mattered at the start were kicking me near the end.

When exporting the images from Reader it is important to export from zoom 4.  I also did a much better job at sorting the images.  Excel works pretty good for this, as I just imported the images.  This way I could drag them to where they matched each other, and then fill in a cell to label them.

The second major thing was that I got serious about the weather pattern.  I was having problems because I was making flat land annoying textures.  When I figured out which moisture level corresponded to each texture change I realized my variables were set way too dry.  There are 16 moisture levels and I think I got them pretty well balanced.  The months represent what moisture exists on flat land:

            June/      May/             Apr/            March/        Feb/
   July    Aug        Sept              Oct              Nov          Dec    Jan
1   2        3     4     5      6    7     8    9    10    11    12    13      14   15    16


I also was having trouble with realism.  At first I thought the warmest/driest should be desert like, but I found this to look strange as it makes desert right next to the sea.  Which I guess does happen, but not where I am, and dunes can be done in a beach mod anyway.

I was happy enough with what I did to post it:  This is one of Dobdriver's maps and can be found on the LEX.

Winter:



Spring/Fall:



Summer:



The max altitude on this map is about 1500, and my MaxTerrainHeight is set to 3000.  So, we are missing some textures.  I can say that there is perma-snow at the altitudes that Girafe suggested, and as that is about 1/4 of the texture map, we aren't missing too much to talk about.  Mapping the top 1/4 will be relatively easy, as I would image we want snow on level ground and rocky details on the slopes.  I figure dry/wet doesn't matter too much up there, so the biggest interest is looking good and being balanced/fun

There are quiet a few things that need sorting:
  1) I think winter is best, but you can see in the top that the textures don't line up between cities.  This is because the wind is coming from a different direction, and I do not understand it.

  2) I think I made the "wet because of the water" zone go a little too far.  Right now green textures are the bottom 4 rows and I think I will try the bottom 2 or perhaps just the lowest.

  3) The high/dry areas defiantly need to be reworked.  I don't like being able to see the temp. lines, especially when they are that color.  So as I drop the green area I will also be smoothing out that section.  I think I ran out of textures and had to start using textures I already had in other places.

  4) One strange issue is a CTD.  With the plugins I have I can no longer demolish Maxis Pines along the edge of the map.  That's right, oaks are okay, and so are pines anywhere else.  I thought I found a "Death Tree", but then I didn't crash with an empty plugin's folder.

At least now I am happy with the mod as a whole and don't feel I have to start all over again.  Tree Controllers work pretty good and sometimes JRJ seasonable lots look excellent.  Sometimes it is just terrible

Thanks for viewing everyone.  Feel free to post any comments or links to maps that you really want this mod to look good in.

[Lowkee33]

...All quiet on the Western Front


Larger (640x480 3.7mb)
(It looks like November got messed up)

Getting close here.  Here are thumbnails to Jan-July:  (August-Dec just cycle back to Jan)
I don't like loading imageshack, so a direct link is below.

January:                     February:                  March:                       April:

January                     February                     March                     April


May:                        June:                        July:                        With Trees:

May                         June                           July                        With Trees

This is the map map as before, but making it smaller and having one region for each month certainly speeds up the testing process.  I learned a few things about optimizing a terrain mod over the week.  By using the "terrainquery" cheat one can get close to the max altitude of the map.  Therefor I set the MaxAltitude in the Terrain Exemplar to near that.  I then changed the TempRangeFactor to something that I thought gave a good spread of textures. 

The same is possible with a tree controller.  There is permanent snow at about 800m for this map, and so I set that to the max altitude in the Flora Brush exemplar (and it's still a little high).  The gif is there to show that seasonable tree can look good, and the "with trees" picture is there to show that a pre-existing tree controller can work quite well.  There is a downside though.  The trees planted best in March/November.  It does not appear that the moisture simulation starts until Mayor Mode is activates, so there's that.

Fall/Winter need to be looked at.  It appears that the green-river-buffer-range was forgotten about.  I wanted winter do defiantly look cold, but I am still learning my way around those textures.  There are not very many, and less that would be suitable for level terrain.  I know for sure the textures I used don't match each other close up anyway.

July/June Jan/Feb are pretty similar.  This is because they are next to each other in moisture, while all of the other months have a 1 or 2 column space.  It is tough to get a smooth transition and still want every month to look different.

The Snow level is actually more quirky than I thought.  At first I had "belts" of rocky snow going through, but it seemed a little silly, so I just left large areas as just snow.  Perhaps I will terraform later and figure out exactly how the region should behave.

Yep, just a few more out of place textures.  Then I get to figure out why in the world the wind is blowing in the opposite direction in the different cities.  I did notice that the cp mods have this attribute as well (same reason that trees don't always line up with a tree controller), but it is far less noticeable.  I think it is a rendering thing. 

[Gringamuyloca]

well your post might not be finished... but I like what I see!

I wish I could help.. but what you are attempting is way over my head!... but I do hope to reap your rewards! 

If there's something in game I can do... or if you need a 'guinea pig'... just let me know... it's about all the help I can offer right now... other than encouragement! 

[Lowkee33]

Thanks.

Actually there is something you could do.  I have attached the Weather Exemplar that I am using for the mod.  If you could test to see if this slows down your game then that would be great.  I am computing less variables, and I think the game should run faster, alas, I have no big cities.

If you are familiar with Ilive's Reader:
   I have the "monthsweeks for complete moisture simulation" set to 52.  Try changing that to 1 (which is default) and see if the rate of game changes.
   If you really want to get deep you can make a Moisture Data View mod (Instructions in the "Advanced" link in my sig), and see if changing that stat to something like 10,000 actually makes any difference at all.


I am not too sure about the uploading permissions this mod falls under.  I am using the cp textures, and therefor they are a dependency.  The problem is that cp hasn't been online recently.  Can anyone speak on his behalf?

I haven't really focused on the packaging part of this mod.  I think I could get away with only uploading the INI and Weather exemplar for the entire mod.  I am looking for opinions about the highest altitude that people play with.  On the other hand, in order to make a terrain look perfect you really have to know how to work with the exemplars.

I know of two mods that need to be terrain specific:  Ennedi's Jagged edges mod and Cogeo's Erosion mod.  Are there any more?  I would basically make those mods myself and include them in the package for simplicity.

[Lowkee33]

Also note that if you use that weather mod you will see a huge difference to the way your terrain looks during the year .

I started rendering a new map to play with all of the things I have learned.  This left side of the city being different is a real killer.  I believe everyone has seen this problem (the trees the controller plants are different on the left side and the tiles don't match up anymore).

I don't know what causes this and if anyone has been able to solve that then that is a giant hurdle this mod has to get over.

Add the HD starry night textures to the list of terrain exemplar mods.

[MattyFo]

I am a little baffled by the Starry Night terrain.  I'm assuming you didn't make that as a regular terrain mod, I;E using diffrent textures for different elevations.  Anyways my question is, would it be possible to get an HD picture of some terrain and import that a custom SC4 terrain.  I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense because terrain mods are in no way my area of expertise.  I'm just curious as to how you did that.

- Matt

[Lowkee33]

Add the HD starry night textures to the list of terrain exemplar mods

Well that is confusing.  I meant to say the The HD StarBackground Mod found on the LEX.

There are about 30 patches that come with it just to make it it work with the various types of terrain mods (different textures/heights/cliffs).  One thing that may be useful is to include the default maxis Terrain Exemplar, and give it a Parent Cohort of the same thing.  This way any mod would only have to be the one/two lines in the Exemplar that it changes, and then point to the parent cohort.

Erosion mods are a little different in that they work within the INI.  Not too hard to put out two (erosion/no erosion) files though.


To answer your question though:  Totally possible.  Do you want to know how?  Basically the only requirements for a texture is that is has been converted to PNG (which can be done in MSpaint), and that is a square with binary dimensions (1,2,4,8,16...128,256,512,1024...).  Once you have that you convert in into a FSH, apply it to the texture map, and it appears in-game.  There are a few more steps, but you could have any picture be your terrain.

For the Starry Night picture I showed I found it online as 1024x1024, and put it into the INI as every moisture and temperature level.  As a side project I wondered the same thing as you, and I found a birds-eye view of some Earth terrain that was very large.  I then used a photo-shopping program to break it into 12 1024x1024s and then loaded each city with it's own section.  As I terraformed mountains where the picture showed there were mountains it looked rather convincing.  The problem is that the size of the image changes as you zoom, so that building a city so that it looks good on the terrain would take a lot of zoom changes, and would probably only look good from the furthest zoom.  I found a large water image online, and that did look pretty cool.  The only problem there is that the textures need to be spread out, so when the water looked good the terrain looked terrible.