PTTG can you also work on atmosphere effects and stuff? So that a place with a lot of Rainbow color could be vibrant and Bloomy while ones with a lot of misery would be grey and colorless?
That really depends on the engine. I'll try playing with some stuff for my mock-ups, but they can't really represent what you'll be getting.
Vactor:
To answer your question, the texture system I'm using gets all it's elevations from displacement mapping, which would be very inefficient to do live. I'd say it's probably best to have premade elevations and paint premade textures on them for the climate, but I'll have to consider your system a little more.
RE: Terrain sytem:
I see! This changes things slightly. Hmm...
I'll get back to you. I have much thinking to do. One question: will similar areas merge? will two adjacent mountain tiles have partial mountain tiles between themselves?
I was also assuming that subtiles inherit climate and other values from the maintile. This will take some reconsidering. I'd still say that having a tile have it's climate and that's that would be a little clearer, but I do like the system you've got there.
Finally, are you treating the surface of a tile and the roots of a tile as separate entites? That would cut down on file sizes a lot, as roots could all be the same no matter what the surface is.
EDIT1:
I've got some options here for the Elevations/Rockiness scale. Take a look and tell me what sounds best:
Water/Pits - Valleys - Lowlands -
Flat - Rolling - Mixed - Hills - Mountains : Through but complex
Deep Water - Shallow Water -
Flat - Hills - Mountainous : I like it because it's pretty even.
Water - Flat -
Rolling - Hills - Mountainous : If you don't care about how deep the water is.
Pit - Flat -
Mixed - Hills - Mountains : No water is implied. I like this one, as it allows for different rockiness levels of water.
EDIT2:
OK, for transitions:
I've come up with a system that will look pretty good and won't take geometrically large numbers of sub-tiles.
Assuming we have five levels, like so:
Open Air - Pit - Water - Flat - Mixed - Hills - Mountains
I make transitions between each type of tile and the center, and between any tile and it's adjacent kind like this:
Open Air - Pit - Water - Flat - Mixed - Hills - Mountains
\____/ \____/ \____/ \____/ \___/ \_______/
Then have the program select something that will fill the gap between any two tiles. For instance, here's two adjacent supertiles:
[SubtileA-2][SubtileA-3] [SubtileA-2][SubtileA-3]
[SubtileA-1][Tile A][SubtileA-4][SubtileB-1][Tile B][SubtileB-4]
[SubtileA-6][SubtileA-5] [SubtileA-6][SubtileA-5]
If Tile A is Mountain and Tile B is Mixed, this is easy:
[SubtileA-1][Mountain][Mnt. to Hills][Hills to Mixed][Mixed][SubtileB-4]
If Tile A is Water and Tile B is Hills, there isn't any normal middle type, so it goes like this:
[SubtileA-1][Water][Water to Flat][Flat to Hills][Hills][SubtileB-4]
If the tiles are already adjacent, then the game will only use one transition and a spacer:
[SubtileA-1][Hill][Hills to Mountain][Mountain Spacer][Mountains][SubtileB-4]
That means I need one transition for each adjacent level, one additional transition for each [level to flat], and a spacer for every other level, for a total of merely 16 total subtile graphics. If I add a few more transitions from, for instance, water to any other level for more diverse coastlines, that would bring my total up to 20. I could then easily add a few permutations of each type for variation, say six kinds, and then the herculean task of 2.28881836 × 10
13 combinations can be done in merely 120 tiles!.
This would only apply to model shapes- the actual meshes. For textures/shaders/coloring/mapping/what have you, these can be pretty much trivially blended together and they would look fine. I can attach a blending mask to the model that will control how much of A's texture shows up and how much of B's shows up, and once complete it would look like every transition out of the trillions of possibilities was hand-painted.
Such a system would probably be a pain to code (at least the system that selects what two transitions to connect), but it's the most efficient system I can think of- and it would look outstanding.
PS: Add 3 more transitions- from air to air, flat to flat, and hills to hills. I forgot that sometimes tiles are next to other, similar tiles. The total number of transition tiles I will have to make would be 138. If I make, oh, 12 each of the seven levels, that's annother 84 tiles. Then we get to start with tile features!