Topic: Altitude indicator and undo at all possible?

Hi,

Is that map compatibility still a goal? I am asking this in regard to the idea of eliminating the "worlds" and allow all terrain types within the same map.

That is not related at all. Even if we merge the worlds, map compatibility with existing S2 and widelands maps would be kept. New maps could just use all the graphics...

I guess this is the same fragment of code that does the "smoothing" of the landscape altitudes? The logic that prevents creating terrain that is inaccessible due to abrupt altitude changes. The S2 developers must have expected their users to create a lot of maps themselves, and so implemented that to keep them from designing unplayable maps.

There are even more reasons for this: when you allow steeper hills, workers should be 'hidden' behind hills that are to their immediate south. This is obviously impractical, because you could not build flags on fields that are hidden this way, but also this would need change to how rendering is done: currently we draw the terrain first, then bobs and immovables in a second step. As terrain could clip over bobs and immovables, this order would need changing and that is not easy to do.

The comparison also made me realize how superior the WL editor really has become!

Thanks. That was the immediate goal when starting the editor

There is one aspect, however, where I favour the S2 output, and that is the borders like the coastline. IMO the old S2 Editor produces less geometrical looking borders; less straight lines and less visible triangular shapes. For me it looks like S2 does not fill the underlying grid structures to the very edge, so coastlines look a lot better. I wished our WL editor could be improved in this aspect.

I think nicolai did misunderstand you here. I think the thing you are talking about is that the triangles in S2 are 'rounded' whenever they touch other terrain so that the triangular shape is not immediately visible. S2 did this by rendering a rectangular texture that depended on both terrain types over the triangle border. We tried to achieve something similar with dithering the edges, but it is just not good enough. I hope that once !OpenGL becomes the de-facto standard, we can add such an additional rendering step for very low cost.

Do you think this can be done at reasonable effort?

Not for the software renderer, no. It should be possible for !OpenGL but might require additional artwork.

Cheers, Holger

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Trying to tweak an excellent random gen map, I'm wishing for a function that would poll the heights of all polygons under a tool size 2 area and set them to the average, or other words, smooth function.

"months disappeared playing S2"

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a "smooth" function is already implemented. Select the noise hight tool and hold CTRL on your keyboard (this will activate the alternative tool) while clicking on the ground.

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