WIP: Natural Diversity

[ancientmuse]

Welp... that cements it Necora.

You now have to build an outhouse for the "honey man" to work at to go with your maritimes mods.



Must. Keep. These. Mods. Authentic.

*snicker snicker*

[Nivzamora]

Hell speaking as an Alaskan? We still have someone who comes out to clean out the honeypot once a month no Ancient times about it!

[Nilla]

Here in Sweden we have that as well. To our place he or she arrives with a large tank trunk, but on same places, they collect them more "hands on" in barrels. I guess it's about the same everywhere, if the population isn't dense enough for pipes.

[Bartender]

The more you know . I guess there are some benefits to living in a tiny country where everything is close enough to lay down some pipes . Anyway..

It's tuesday already, so we're starting to run a bit behind schedule.. here's Sneak Peek #5!

This past week has been a week of a variety of things, and yet of nothing in particular. It was a week of bushes, boats, bridges, brainstorms about biofuels, and branches. There were other things, such as rocks, reeds and raw materials, but their names did not fit well into the last sentence. Other than arranging the words according to their first letter, we are afraid that there is not much of a theme to discover in this week's sneak peek. In absence of such a common denominator, we will resort to simply showing you whatever is close enough to completion to be shared.

The reed farm
My honourable colleague @despo_20 has spent most of this week working on the next part of the reeds and grasses chain; the as of yet unnamed reed farm. Due to limitations in the game code regarding the spawning of resources on the river banks, we spent a long time testing various possibilities for this building. In the end, we decided that the most realistic and historically accurate approach was to go for a boat on the small river, with a bridge connecting the two shores. The building functions similarly to a forester, planting and harvesting reeds in an influence area along the river banks. The associated profession will be a reaper, similarly to the reaper's shed that gathers grasses. The gathered reeds can be processed by the thatcher or be used for the construction of fish traps. They will also be compatible with the reeds introduced in CC.




Alternative Rocks
A few weeks ago I have shown some images of rocks in the rivers. This week, we have worked to create suitable meshes and textures for these water rocks. In the process, we have decided to kill two birds with one stone (or two flies in one slap as we say in Dutch), and start an overhaul of the rocks on land as well.

The state of diversity in the original rocks is rather appaling; there are only three meshes and they all have a bland, low-quality grey texture. To improve this, we have done several things; I have created (and am still creating) many different meshes, currently a total of 8, to allow for more diversity. Meanwhile, Despo has created several new rock textures with increasing amounts of moss/algal growth on them, for some colour variation. Lastly, a trick in the coding allows us to spawn each mesh at several different sizes, multiplying the number of variants we can create.

The result of this is that with just these 8 meshes, we have managed to create 12 unique variants for the water rocks (flat meshes with heavy algal growth textures only), and 36 unique variants for the land rocks (all meshes, with low and medium moss growth textures), a selection of which is shown in the second screenshot.




That concludes this week's preview! We've been working on many other things in the past weeks, including the things we mentioned at the start of this post but didn't show. We are not quite ready to share those, but they will be shown in subsequent sneak peeks!

[Necora]

Wonderful stuff! I love the reed farm.

[elemental]

The land rocks look really nice. I'm not so sure about the water ones though. Not enough of them, maybe? Or perhaps it's because they are all under the water? Can you make some buildable decorative rocks that stick out of the water? (and maybe some that sit under the water too  ). That would be quite fantastic.

Have you considered making a gravel/rock stream in the smaller (shallower) creeks?

[Tom Sawyer]

With underwater rocks keep in mind that they cannot be removed by citizens and will block water buildings. I let them spawn very rare in the water, just to have some nice looking obstacles for a bit difficulty but it would be annoying with too many of them.

[elemental]

@Tom Sawyer I remember your pic of the underwater rocks with Tany's water lilies. It looked really nice.

Ghost rocks wouldn't interfere with anything but probably can't spawn naturally.

[Tom Sawyer]

Yes, natural resources cannot be ghosted, as far as I know.

[Bartender]

@Tom Sawyer In fact they can, sort of . These rocks don't block construction on the water, and they don't even get removed if anything is constructed over them, as you can see in the picture.



What I did is to add a pathBitmap to the template, like in ghosted resources:

Code Select Expand

MapDescription map
{
PathType _pathType = Normal;
bool _addOnCreate = true;

String _pathBitmap =
".";
}

Now this results in a resource without a footprint, though it has some limitations. If you spawn a resource like this on land, they will block construction. Villagers can't remove them because they are ghosted, so the construction can't be completed. However, when the resource is placed in the water, it doesn't block construction. I suspect that this is because the z-value is different, but that's just a guess.

@elemental We'll look at how to make the spawn behaviour work in such a way that it gives the most realistic result, personally I agree that it could be improved . There is somewhat of a limit to how dense we can make them though; filling all the rivers adds quite a number of resources to the map, which could result in performance issues on older systems if we overdo it. Adding some rocks that stick out of the water is part of the plan, as well as some waterplants in the right places.

[Tom Sawyer]

@Bartender My rocks did not block bridges too but trading posts and fishing docks. I have tried your snipped and it indeed produces ghosted natural resources. They cannot be removed but don't block buildings. Perfect solution for underwater rocks. Great find again!

[elemental]

We'll have to upgrade Barty to super wizard class coder. 

[Bartender]

Haha, so did I just level up ?

[despo_20]

Bartender is able to see the Matrix code 
Where we see rocks in the river, he sees a digital green rain 

[RedKetchup]

haha