[Region 1][Map 07][Location 01] Fentor Cross Area

[Redrobes]

Yeah I am having some great fun. This is one of the first times that GTS has been used to generate some deep terrain stuff. I'm trying out all sorts of stuff here.

This is my Dragon Flight prog. Its a freebie but it does not come with the height map and color map for this. But I have uploaded the app and the height maps for it here. Its 10Mb so be easy on the download - my poor web server
(I'll prob take it down in a week or so to stop killing it).

Run DF, click past the help dialog. Now press 'P' for about 3 seconds. Press 'H' four times. Maximize it and press '6'. Enjoy
(Tell me if it works alright. Its the new V1.05 released yesterday)

[su_liam]

I'm liking the erosion a lot. It gets a little, "raindrops on fine sand," in the larger scales, but hey... Still real nice.

It looks like the English countryside-like toponyms I'm using for the Stoutlings must be a Groamish thing.

Does Fentor Cross have a problem with floods?

[ravells]

Hmmm when I pressed 6 nothing happened. Any ideas, redrobes?

[Redrobes]

Hmmm when I pressed 6 nothing happened. Any ideas, redrobes?

Hmm... No actually !
The numbers 1-8 perform changes in the resolutions to fixed amounts. It might take a second or two to generate it. You could tell whether the keys are working at all by using the '1' and '2' keys because they should be much faster but lower res. The res is displayed at the top title bar.

1 = 128, 2 = 256, 3 = 384, 4 = 512, 5 = 768, 6 = 1024, 7 = 1536, 8 = 2048

You can press 'T' and 'Y' to go up down in res too but its best if you go with a multiple of the native height map res. The one provided is 1024 height with 2048 color.

Some cards barf when going too big tho. Thats the GL driver throwing in the towel for trying to allocate too much memory. Some ATI cards start rendering the scene half white or all white even with a color.bmp file. From experience, only nVidia cards seem to get it right but my testing was a long time ago and I expect things have changed.

On my machine with a 7600GS it will do the 2048 but you can't have any other GL apps running at the same time. I have tested on a lower spec ATI card at lower res and its alright too.

Anyway, if pressing the '1' & '2' keys change res, all I can suggest is to run up the task manager and see if after pressing the '6' key it does a lot of processing and when that finishes does the title bar change to 1024 res.

The image wont change, just the quality of the height terrain.

Edit -- actually maybe whats happening is that 1024 is too much for your card and its failing one of the calls to generate and display it. I am using a pretty advanced feature of storing the entire terrain on the graphics card so that its much faster. You do need a big card for bigger res. Go up the scale and see if it stops working after a few. 512 square ought to be fine tho and thats seriously better than the 100 its starts up in.

[ravells]

Oh I'm sorry, I was expecting a flythough! I've got a twin core with 2 gigs of ram and two graphic cards, so I guess it ought to be able to handle the memory requirement

[Redrobes]

Ah I should think so then

If you set it to a reasonable res like 256 or 512 (depends on how much graphics grunt you have) you can press O,P,I,J,K,M for moving the camera and W,A,S,Z,E,R for moving the target position for the camera (the yellow line). So you should be able to get a real time flyable view.

It's intended as a debugging tool for terrains and also as a means to position your party at point A and view point B and show players what you would see.

It can do automated fly throughs but not using the keyboard or without getting it hooked up on the network. For stand alone purposes the network bits on the menu are redundant.

The screen save should work ok too. It merely saves out a fixed filename image.

Edit-- I should also point out that my Jan Challenge had some dragon flight sets to download. I think they are still there for the taking. Put them in a different directory and copy the DF exe to it before running.

[ravells]

wow, that's really impressive! I had great fun flying around your lands!

[su_liam]

Karst, eh? Yay, SINKHOLES! Lots of cool caves for the orcs and trolls and whatever troglodytic nightmares to hang out in.

I'm a big fan of tropical karst myself. Closest thing your going to find in the real world to perlin noise

Erosion gets more complicated in a way at larger scales. There will be gullied areas, especially where groundcover is disturbed, that will look exactly like miniature Grand Canyons. But there will also be areas, depending on subterranean drainage and vegetation that don't really appear to be eroded. I have actual small closed basins in my own backyard!!! About a thousand of them, depending on how close you look.

No matter what the fractal fans say, self similarity breaks down at very large scales. Rivers can actually climb uphill a little. In summer, the river through my town leaves numerous little pools in basins of significant depth. Some are nearly as tall as I am, sometimes. Try that on a continental map and see how many people laugh at you...

Don't think I was criticising your erosion engine. It rocks.

Actually, I need to get back to my map. Placing settlements and features is getting to be a headache and my labels are annoying me to no end. If I can't get the Boroughs looking decent, I may let someone else see if they can do a less sucky job with them.

Anyway, see ya' later!

[Redrobes]

Karst, eh? Yay, SINKHOLES! Lots of cool caves for the orcs and trolls and whatever troglodytic nightmares to hang out in.

Yeah maybe. The uplands are pretty safe esp along the merchant roads but its a big place so I guess it could definitely have areas off of the main path thats home to some green skins.

...that will look exactly like miniature Grand Canyons.

I can do grand canyons quite easily. I have more problem persuading it not to do them. The harder part is getting it to erode down a hill side so that it does not cut a 2 mile knife like cutting into the hill. As soon as the water forms the start of a cutting its hard to prevent it going faster and faster into the hill.

Don't think I was criticising your erosion engine.

Its ok, I know it has some good some bad tho. The water and run off is good but the macro erosion like thermal could be better.

Anyway - I have some more to post so let me start a new one...

[Redrobes]

I have done some more mapping between bouts of chores. I am trying to get to a point where people can pile in with their own stuff and I think we're there.

Below is a Typical Fort. You can use the map by itself but it needs some more buildings. It needs at least two special buildings also:-

A Wyvern Tower
A Rain Catcher.

The Wyvern Tower is described in detail on the wiki entry here.

A rain catcher needs to be some kind of guttering into a large vat, pitcher, barrel or something similar.

If anyone wants to map or even just side on sketch either of these then post and go for it. Instead of changing the image below though, just make a map of just the building as its likely to be used in many forts and towns. I can composite them together no problem. If anyone wants to put some houses in or even just pencil out or describe a possible layout for a fort then that would be cool too. The image can easily be modified if you don't like what is there already.

Anyone fancy drawing a Lesser Wyvern ? - side on or top down I'm not picky...

So, step up to the challenge and make this truly cooperative.

My intention, though thats not binding, was that all the forts around Fentor are similar. We can jiggle some buildings around and have different characters in them etc but the shape and style are similar.

I'll try to get a similar blank patch for Fentor Cross Town too.