Topic: Identify terrain

mxb2001 wrote:

Is there a key or something to ID what type of terrain is on the map? Did not find one in the controls help.

I don't think there is any form of ID terrain in the game itself, Although the 'trees' part of the in game help may show the terrain, but I haven't looked.

The aussies are coming, ya ho! ya ho!

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Ron_of_Nord wrote:

Sorry, I just realised how old the original post is...whoops...

LOL. I happily and intentionally would reply to 50 year old posts. Back in the olden days of the usenet we old guys hammered out something called "netiquette" (proper behaviour on the 'net) and it does not include anything about old posts.

Not sure what silly nonsense the kids have been spreading about "necroposting" but it's not a real thing no matter how much they push the idea. <grin>

Anyways, my post is still something I stand behind. Memorizing what each terrain looks like in widelands is impractical since the differences are ultra subtle. I don't mean knowing that green = grass and so on. WL has many ultra fine terrain distinctions.

Apparently one problem is that each "space" in WL is not a space but the intersection of 6 triangular pizza slices. Kudos for being different to WL, but it does make somethings outrageously complicated. Not that it should be changed (couldn't without destroying the game I think) but more help for players dealing with it would be great. Most players coming to WL will be used to hexes or squares.

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To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

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Widelands has three ways to place things:

1. on a field, that's a triangle
2. on a node, that's a corner of a triangle
3. on an edge, that's the edge of a triangle

But the third is probably a calculation of two nodes (2.).

Currently only terrains are placed on a field (1.), all other map objects are placed on nodes (2.), or in case of roads the edges between two triangles. In this image (taken from Helpterrains) the terrain is just green with colored borders to see the nodes (from a time where the editor had no possibility to show the grid):

Is there a key or something to ID what type of terrain is on the map? Did not find one in the controls help.

I think this question is not clear enough to get answered. Do you mean terrain for a specific field or do you want to have some sort of list containing all terrains in a map? What kind of information do you want to know?

Probably the most interesting thing of a terrain is the probability of tree growing. The editor help has some information about that and the place terrain tool shows the probability of tree growing also.

In a game the probability of tree growing is currently not very important since most maps have enough good soil for tree growing an the rule of thumb "the more green the terrain the better trees do grow" is valid. Can't tell if this will be true for add-ons.
In the very past there was the idea to give terrains also a probability to grow for other things, like wine, wheat or corn. In result e.g. corn will grow good only on specific terrains. If this will be implemented some when, then the need for a player to get the information on which terrain which thing will grow will be needed. Maybe an additional task for a geologist then. But this is not planned at the moment at all, afaik.

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Ron_of_Nord wrote: Firstly, I've been around computer systems from the 80's and can remember dial-up modems, bulletin boards and , yes, usenet.
Ahh those were the heady days of modem-crashes, dropouts, characters that didn't properly decode between different manufacturers ( are you listening commodore? )

Oh I pretty much assumed you're an old geezer like me. Takes one to know one. ; )

Eh and lay off my beloved Commie! Yes I am a proud Commie user, my second computer was a 128. Man it has some gorgeous PETSCII. You could draw some stunning art just using it.

Remember something called a "war dialer"? I recall I used it once. No caller ID back in those days, you could get away with it. <grin>

I agree that memorizing the terrains is impractical, and yes, I got quiet a shock on WL's nodes, as I was used to squares or hexes as the base of map systems.
However, times change, and whilst I haven't memorized all the terrain types, I assume that green area's will atleast grow trees,
brown , black or yellowish areas may be good for farming and lava/lava rock is good for nothing except burned feet.
Ice may be walked on, but why do we have one type of snow that can't be crossed when there are others that can be built on ? I don't have a lot of personal experience with snow.

Actually I have it from up high that farming doesn't give a hoot about terrain. The only real farming in the game appears to be tree farming as they are the only type that consider terrain at all.

Lastly what is necroposting? Sending messages after you are gone? Bah humbug <grin>

Hahahaha, now that'd be a feat. Yeah I think that's what they call replying to an "old" post. Worse yet they don't seem to have any standard for how old is old. It's all pretty silly IMHO.

Oh as for the other posts: Thanks for the explanation Kaputnik, the more often the unusual WL way is explained the better it manages to work its way into my hidebound and set in its gaming ways brain. I think too that my question about IDing a terrain was pretty much based on the standard concept of a hex or square being ID'ed. Not sure one could even mouse over a field in order to point to a triangle so as to get its ID! So I suppose my request is kind of impossible since it was premised on hexes not nodes.

Oh and P.S. Ron, I still have my 1982 Atari 800 in full working order! XF551 disk drive (double sided double density, a WHOPPING 360KB!!!) and a steaming fast XM301 modem (300 baud). The old cassette drive though seems to have given up the ghost as have so many other tape players I own. : ( The 1986 Commodore 128 also works although some keys stick and the 1571 drive is down to one sided function (like a 1541 basically).

Yes, I have a computer museum here at home. ; ) Love to keep & collect old things. Currently re-reading my collection of 1982 Personal Computing mags. Man those were the days when the Apple II was KING! CP/M was the universal OS! Delightful to time travel back to when people would refer to MS-DOS by some little company called Microsoft... Oh and the prices... $15,000 for a laser printer? Normal. Inkjet? Same. Hard disks? Sure they had them. Also 15 grand. OTOH you could get a cheap VIC20 for a mere $900. (all prices adjusted for inflation)

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To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

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Ron_of_Nord wrote:

I had my commodore sx-64 for nearly 45 years, along with it's dot -matrix printer until it got to the point where I couldn't get the parts
I needed to repair it. I used to plug all sorts of whacky homemade devices into the parallel port until one day I killed it to the point where I couldn't fix it, I woild never actually attack another commodore user, we whom owned one learned the basics and more from
those simpler machines. I don't have my old girl anymore, but I still miss it at times,

Hail fellow C= ;- ) Yeah it was very tribal in those days as you recall. C= vs Atari vs Apple vs TRS, etc. I was of course sort of split due to the Atari 800 I had but I did all my BBSing on the C=128 so that's the tribe I guess I'm with!

As for MS-DOS, well , I still spend more time using the command line window in windows than the gui, I can do more without the gui.
Man , I must be getting old,

My CLI abilities were getting very rusty thanks to using Win9x from 1997-2018. Now that I'm back on Linux (used it briefly from 1998-2003 in parallel) I'm finding that in spite of the pretty GUI the current distros put up front a lot of advanced stuff really needs you to goto a konsole/terminal and do some commanding. I'm starting to get serious about Linux (after using it for 10 aggregate years? well heh what can I say...) now and to do that it's back to editing text config files and the command line, etc.

Thanks for the description of necro posting, I hadn't heard the term, you learn something new everyday, or so I have heard,
BTW the prices you listed ? You can pretty much double them for what those things would have cost here in my country, that's
what we get for living at the bottom end of the planet.

Yeah those were US prices. In Canada they were about 20% higher as I can tell by comparing my dad's receipt for the Atari 800 and the prices he found in the magazine. Found his notes in the mag too, kinda cool to see him planning the purchase.

what is a 'war dialler' ? I have never heard that term...

Oh he he... it's a program for your modem that dials ALL the numbers in a telephone exchange! You know like 555-xxxx It records any that answer with a carrier and let's you snuffle out secret modem numbers. Pretty evil, but the name says it all I think...

Also, the 1541 only held 160kb, not 180kb ( atleast that's what it would do down here)

Hell yeah that's exactly right. So many years of MS-DOS formatted floppies almost made me forget. IIRC the 20 KB difference was due to a larger directory overhead in the CBM format? Reading the '82 magazine I saw just how varied disk capacities were then. Each brand had a different size. The coolest thing was those 8" floppies! Wow they stored a megabyte. Never seen one in real life alas.

As the rest of your post, I agree, farming works nearly every where, but trees can be a problem. Kaputnik is awesome, as is Nordfiese,
both who have been great help and patient with some of my more , let's just say , dumb questions. Thanks to all those who have helped in the past.

Trees can be a pain to grow sometimes. Although it seems that there is almost a tree type for every sort of terrain and thanks to the planters being "upgraded" to plant the best tree at the best spot it's become easier than earlier versions of WL were.

Still it feels like on snow you pretty much need perhaps 4 planters per lumberjack instead of two. The space 4 plus their roads would take though seems like one would get nowhere. Of course I usually remove planters roads (except for Amazons, I got hugely screwed with that until I learned they need to be connected so that they "know" what type is in demand!).

It would be nice if one could point to a node and it would tell you the % chance for a tree to grow there. Dunno, maybe that's a cheat though and we're supposed to use our Fingerspitzengefühl.

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