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[Vactor]

there are actually right now 96 poly per subtile, or 384 poly per tile side, 768 with the root, so ~ 80k poly, and culling is not active right now, as the root tiles draw with their back face outward.  I'm looking at getting some work done on this this week.

[Yanlin]

That seems like... A lot... I've seen some pretty ass models with only about 1k polygons. They are far bigger than your tiles.

[Poltifar]

First of all, i'd like to say that this game idea is great, and I can't wait to get a chance at playing it

Now, an idea i had while reading previous posts (I'm not sure if it was already proposed, as i havent read all the posts yet):
Instead of having a certain type of unit get, for example, -2 movement on mountain terrain and +2 of fields, how about using the proposed scale of 0-1000 for terrain 'stats' to better use, by giving each unit type similar stats, and comparing the unit and terrain stats. So lets say a flat field has a elevation of 150, and a certain untit has preferred heigh of 50. The difference is 100, and that is used in calculating speed or whatever. Another unit has a preferred height of 200, which means that on the above flat field the difference would be 50, making it faster than the other unit. That way, the closer the unit's preferred stat is to the terrain stat, the better, and the farther in either direction, the worse.

EDIT: Also, a question. After reading some more, it seems you are gona have the option for people to run singleplayer games and/or their own servers? Is that true? Or will there be only a single server for all players, run by you, as is the case with most MMOs nowadays?

[Vactor]

quick update for those who are still following this-

Just as we closed session in the senate at the start of this month, I was offered a promotion and am currently working the Joint Finance Committee as it starts to consider the budget for the upcoming biennium, which needless to say, is taking up a large part of my time.  I still have my previous responsibilities for session when we pick up in the next few weeks, as well as traveling with the JFC as they tour the state in the coming weeks. 

Despite not being able to do much coding, I am keeping this project on my mind, with a hope that as we get into the summer I'll have a greater opportunity to get more work in on this.

Thanks again everyone for your encouragement and suggestions.

[Neonivek]

Great for you Vactor!

[Tahin]

Please don't let this die. It looks really promising.

[Deon]

Congratulation with promotion! I hope you won't leave this project in your past though ^^.

[PTTG??]

Good to hear from you! Good luck with the JFC!

[Areyar]

I've always had a weakness for floating islands.

interesting, so I'll have to read those 22 pages sometime.

A question on tile acquisition: does the wizard have influence on how his new lands are added to his/her existing lands?
Are tiles stacked?
i.e. can land be deposited on top of another, creating higher land/mountains in which tunnels/mines can be dug out?

edit:
now that the entire thread is read, I'd say: go for the procedural approach, don't use predesigned models for terrain.
generate the islands when changed and save the individual models.
(generate tile added and modify adjacent tiles)
Not only roughness values etc. could be set per tile by a random seed, determined at the time of tile adding, but each mountain can have a different height, tied in to mineral content.   
The basic rules for generation should allow for the islands to be generated on separate clients from the tile values and the random seed values, so there should be no need to transfer all the vertice information. ...depending on where the bottleneck would be, transfer of data or CPU cycles.

also for textures:
generate them on the fly by mixing various colour values depending on environment type (moist/height/temp) in some sort of fractal method
(example: startopia environmental deck or how evilness is represented in the terrain in B&W2)
and on edge sub-tiles mix with sample of adjacent tile.


I don't want to be a dick, but the root tiles suck. :p
I'd prefer the outer roots to be upside down mountains, while internal tile roots are connected with ridges.

[DFNewb]

is this still getting updated?

Yes this is a bump

[PTTG??]

Hey, I've been talking to Tahin about this general thing- not the specific game, but the world in general, and we've come up with some fun stuff. We have a GURPS template for the Airland Wizards.
I wanted to know if You're still working on this, or if we're on our own with the universe.

[Vactor]

This is still on my plate, i haven't done anything on it recently, but i'm on the cusp of diving back in.  I'll probably take a few steps backwards graphics wise when i take this back up, so that I have a bit more latitude in what I am doing with it.  I've had some new ideas in regards to airland architecture, but first I want to get into the actual gameplay. 

Taking a cue from Toady, I'm going to scale back my graphical efforts until I know what I'm going to want out of said graphics. 

I'd love to hear what you guys come up with. 

[Techhead]

I just skimmed the entire thread.
On the hot/cold and wet/dry transitions, you could make them simply blend the textures and not worry about the terrain too much. Thinking about texture colors in general, if you are implementing different types of ores deposits, make rock textures vary accordingly.

Also, considering that all the landscapes are 'assembled', why not give sharply contrasting terrain harsher borders in between? As if a careless wizard just slammed an Arctic mountain range next to a slice of the Sahara and a patch of tropical rainforest.

[PTTG??]

Even these harsh borders would require the same amount of art resources.
In fact that's kind of the thing I would want to try out.

Luckily, with the systems I'm using, I may be able to create a pretty satisfactory transition generator that will have the best of both worlds.

[bjlong]

I really like this idea! Here are some suggestions that if you don't implement, I will immediately decry the project and leave, only to sheepishly return when it gets finished and is awesome.

First, remember that these are islands. Economic problems should be rampant if you want to raise a considerable army without a coalition backing you.

One thing I see as a possible resource is water. It seems that most islands would want to avoid storms, and that there simply wouldn't be enough "incentive" for clouds to rain on these mountains. An inventive player could surround his tower with mountains and hills, creating a bowl-shaped depression, and fly through clouds, "harvesting" water that other people would buy to fuel their agriculture and/or magic. Perhaps magic could be spent to generate water, but I dunno.

One very simple check on flying combat units is the fact that flying, biologically speaking, is increadibly draining, so carrying 50-100 lbs of combat gear would be difficult over any real range. Infantry would be able to pick off flying units easily, if they go toe-to-toe, but raids with flying units would leave infantry blustering about.

But, yes, we should be able and encouraged to use everything to our advantage--for example, dropping things on our enemies from a height, dropping our islands on enemies, boring up from under the enemy, deforming an island so that the enemy misses their ramming attack, and so on. This is just one part of it, though--magic will need to operate by principles that people will be able to quickly grasp, so that advantages and implications like the ones above should be apparent with some thought.