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[PTTG??]

What I'm going to do next then is make permanent polymodels for the various elevations instead of the implied ones. That would give you better-looking, more efficient tiles, but you would not be able to have non-discreet Roughness levels like you where talking about. Similar with pre-painted textures, you'll have better looking tiles, but they'll have less variety and can only have explicit values.

Now I was talking to Tahin about this, and I'm thinking that extreme temperature values, like magma pools or glaciers, need to be special tiles instead of normal climate-based ones. I would also suggest the same with water tiles. The main reason is that it doesn't matter how much rainfall you get on your magma, you still can't grow any corn there. Some tile values might have some effect, for instance roughness- a flat lava tile may be some ashen fields with some pools or a river, while a rocky one will be a volcanic crater.

On the topic of water and walls; I'm going to assume that a tile with water in it will have the shores be based on what that tile's roughness is, and they will be in that tile's, um, subtiles. I'm also going to start trying to make up some of these subtiles in my mockup, though that's a big job; with 125 possible tiles alone, if there has to be a joint between any two, there will be (125¹²⁵=)15625 to make.
Well, I could make a transition for each dimension and then overlay them, so that's ((5²)*3=)75 different transitions If I make a dozen different ones to avoid repetition, that will be a mere 450 subtiles. Add our normal tiles (5*3*6=)90, that's 510 basic tile graphics. Without anything besides terrain. However, the total number of visually distinct full tiles is going to be ((125⁶)*6)=2.28881836 × 10¹³.
This will be fun!

Anyway, I'll show you what I mean about shorelines after I get a few more mockups done.

Edit: Oops, I forgot that there is one more possible tile, "empty". Please increase all the above numbers by an order of magnitude.

[Neonivek]

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?

Well PTTG or whoever is good at that

[Vactor]

heres a better display of what i was thinking for hilly and mountain tiles(with their inverse being valleys and pits):




so 1 hill tile has the center subtiletile considered flat (in green), and 6 half subtiles surrounding it considered hilly, or slopes (in yellow)

1 mountain tile has the center subtile considered Mountainous (in red), and 6 half subtiles surrounding it considered hilly or slopes ( in yellow again)

Would you be able to use what you've been doing to give the sloped areas a hilly look and the mountain areas a jagged mountainous look?   My idea with this is that there are certain things that can be built on flat portions of a subtile, certain things that can be built on flat or hilly, and some things that can be built on mountainous.  just as an example perhaps you can only have town centers on flat tiles, but you can build residences on hills or flat, walls would go on hills or flat as well.  Mountainous tiles could be impassable through the center subtile, with all edge subtiles required to be hilly and passable.  Mines could be built on mountainous subtiles.

We'd still be able to have a spectrum of how rough the terrain of a tile is, with different ranges falling into mountain or hill, (valley or pit for negative elevation) for example: 001-400 would be flat for the iconic purposes, 401-700 would be considered a hill tile, 701-1000 a mountain.

**edit**
what this style can do is give a very basic way to model using elevation to advantage, an artillery type unit, or a fortification could gain advantages by being built on the top of a hill (the flat center tile of a hilly tiles) slope faces can give units advantages defending, tunnels could be dug through mountains allowing units to move through it, but only between the hilly subtiles the tunnel connects

[PTTG??]

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 × 10¹³ 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!

[Vactor]

Pit - Flat - Mixed - Hills - Mountains : No water is implied. I like this one, as it allows for different rockiness levels of water.

This would be my favorite (by mixed and hills do you mean slopes and hilltops? or mixed being a functionally flat tile that offers advantages and disadvantages similar to a slope without leading to a functional hilltop?)

This allows for a water system to be developed by the arrangement of tiles.  A mountain tile with a spring fed river origins will have rivers start to form on adjacent tiles until the water finds a way off the airland, or into a pit or valley.

I'm thinking it would probably be best to keep mountain subtiles as only existing in the center subtile, both as it seems more logical (stick 2 mountains side by side and they form a valley between them) and it also prevents a player from simply making an impenetrable barrier of mountain tiles.  With them just being in the center it ensures that a line of mountain tiles retains a minimum of 50% passability, which is about as far as i think we should go with bottlenecks.

**edit** yes I was planning on having each tile be 2 parts, the root (same for all) and a cap for each different type of tile surface variation.

[The Doctor]

Just curious, how deep will the customization be? Like, can you design your own armor and troops, and buildings? Or will there be preset versions of those? (Like, the first one would be a Roman helmet with Mongolian armor and a Norse axe. The second would be a Roman Legionary, a Norse barbarion, and a Mongol Raider.)

[PTTG??]

I've added a little to the post above that explains my idea a some more. There are three other things in particular I wanted to mention:
- The system, as it's set up in that example would have the following transitions built in:
Mountain To Mountain
Mountain To Hills
Mountain To Flat
Mountain To Water (this and all other "To Water" transitions are coastlines of various sharpness.)
Hills To Hills
Hills To Mixed
Hills To Flat
Hills To Water
Mixed To Mixed (note that Mixed would mean that the terrain is uneven but without significant elevation change or major cliffs- in other words, neutral. I'm using it as a zero value in the stats)
Mixed To Flat
Mixed To Water
Flat To Flat
Flat To Water
Flat To Air
Flat To Pit
Water To Water
Water To Air (a waterfall into the void between Airlands.)
Water To Pit (a waterfall into an internal canyon or pit.)
Air To Air (since Air doesn't even have a model, this is just here for completeness)
Air To Pit (Air will have priority over Pits, so that they create indentions into the outline where they meet the edge.)
Pit To Pit

Counting all permutations, duplicates, and everything, that comes to only 192 sets of tile art.

I've Added Water for two reasons: it would look neat to have a ever-pouring waterfall of the edge of the Airland, and because I needed one more elevation to fill out the chart. Air is there so that there is a system that will create the edge of the airland. Only Water, air, and pit tiles can go up to the edge; even a range of mountains will have a boundary of flattish terrain.

About Mountains: Before you've made up your mind about the mountain valleys, consider that having your airland sealed off around the edge would be just as detrimental (no trade, for instance) as the advantage of slowing down enemy troops, and enemies could get air units that can cross over mountain borders easily.
Besides, I don't think that a lot of conical mountains in a line would look as good as a blended together mountain range. With good balancing, a smart player will know to use mountains with strategy and not just spam them around. For instance, instead of having mountains be impassible barriers,(Pits would probably be more along those lines) have them affect units in different ways, so that infantry won't have a huge problem, while chariots will move at only a few percent the speed.

PS: Add 26 to that number of tiles. We'll probably want low-poly distance models for other Airlands that aren't docked. And the ground.
PPS: Ahhhhh! I forgot about the 3-tile junctions. It'll take me a while to figure out how to account for them. Is it feasible to use grayscale heightmaps for tile shapes? No, that won't work...

EDIT:
I've spent some time working this out on paper and I've realized that this system is close, but will have some unavoidable issues. I've decided that the whole thing will work better if each tile has a transition to any other tile. that's still a mere 7²= 49. Add some variants and it's 294 transition tiles. I still have to add center tiles to that number.

EDIT EDIT: AHA! This is even better than I thought! With this, you can have a narrow set of tiles between two identical ones, like a stream through the mountains, or a ridge line over a row of hills

[socially_inept_butterfly]

Could placing my airland under another airland's waterfall create a pool of water on my airland, hypothetically? That would be pretty cool.

[Vactor]

I've got the basics of a HUD coming along, which should adjust its layout to any resolution it comes up against:

using this as a source:


the game turns it into this automatically:



It will be able to use any size picture as a source, but right now it only reads the middle pixel to figure out how to do the borders.

As far as mountain tiles go i'll keep thinking about it.  would it be possible to have the subtiles joining two mountains to form a mountainpass type tile? where it could visually appear to like part of the mountains, giving it the aesthetic value you pointed out.  I think i would prefer players to have to build destructible walls rather than relying on lined up mountain tiles.  I just see it turning into something where a player can too easily swap their tiles around to turtle up, giving themselves relative immunity to ground based attacks, which I think ground based military should be the most commonplace, air based units as generally speaking special and support units. 

These ideas are of course subject to change as we go forward and as the system develops.

Just curious, how deep will the customization be? Like, can you design your own armor and troops, and buildings? Or will there be preset versions of those? (Like, the first one would be a Roman helmet with Mongolian armor and a Norse axe. The second would be a Roman Legionary, a Norse barbarion, and a Mongol Raider.)

While I'd have to say I'd like to have the first scenario, i can't say for sure until we try to do it.  Another aspect of unit customization will be the race of the unit, and the races of your villages.  Ideally i'd like say orcs to be able to smith certain types of weapons that can be then traded for and equipped by other races, so in your scenario you could have a unit of Wendigos wielding Centaur crafted Atlatl, and wearing wooden armor grown for them by the neighboring tree-kin village. 

I think that humans should probably be the most common population, with the common fantasy creatures slightly behind them, like dwarves, elves, followed by gnomes, halflings, goblins on into more rare races like pucks, anubi, satyrs, cyclopses, with things like dragons and stone giants rare and powerful creatures that will reside as an individual on you airland(not in villages).

Could placing my airland under another airland's waterfall create a pool of water on my airland, hypothetically? That would be pretty cool.

I won't say it won't happen

[The Doctor]

Can we make a pit that goes down through the tile root, creating a sucking vortex? That'd be cool to have on your Airland, a vortex that you sacrifice to. I'd imagine it turns into a Wind Element tile, with wind elementals hovering near it.

[Rilder]

* Rilder watches the thread with interest.

The world needs some good MMORTSes.

[qwertyuiopas]

If the waterfall idea is used, couldn't it be taken one step further, by using it a s a weapon? Especially with magma?

[omagaalpha]

Though you should consider that if water or any other liquid on island is drain when goes off the edge, that if island generating less then they are  losing with water or any other liquid amount then level for liquid slowly go down until there is none of it.

Of course if there too much you can start flooding island with water or any other liquid amount .

[Ivefan]

You guys know what moving fluids does to DF right? This is intended to be a mmo so having the server keeping count on the quantity of water on every single isle would be stagering.
Also, waterfalls would need to be quite large to have any effect and manuvering the clumbersome isle above another for the miniscule effect would not be worth the effort.
It would have been another matter if one could drop a Hextile onto another for devastating effect but that's not a good idea in terms of gamebalance.

[Yanlin]

If the waterfall idea is used, couldn't it be taken one step further, by using it a s a weapon? Especially with magma?

Slaves to Vactor. God of awesome 2: Dwarf Airland.