Problem Maps

[RyanCrierie]

Problem map

[Mraah]

Ryan,

Your HvyWoods is pointing to the BLACK color ... ie the road

Change it to read the dark green color ... see my screenshot ... arrow pointing to green color and where the C: eyedropper needs to be set.

EDIT : Hmm, you don't have anything set to hvy woods anyhow....ir no hvywoods terrain identified ?

The image you see in the game will differ because of the x/y tiling and your distance viewed from the texture ... ie mipmaps. The more x/y you use (900/900) the closer you need to be to see the detail.

[Stridor]

Thanks Rob!

[Mraah]

ORIGINAL: Stridor

Thanks Rob!

Stridor,

Your welcome but I'm not too sure I know what exactly the problem is .... [&:] ... other than what I stated above.

Rob

[Stridor]

Ryan,

I downloaded your map and found several issues and I think I know what your problem was, so if you don't mind I will talk you through it.

1. Textures

It seemed as though you originally had more colors on this map than you do now (and some were deleted?) because I found texture color references to colors which were no longer on the map.

Consider the texture box. All map ground textures are laid down on top of the "terrain" texture. This allows you to change the terrain texture and it will radically change the look of your map (you can change from winter or beach or rock etc). So the terrain texture is your base texture. You need to get that right in your head before you start planning your map as all other textures will blend into this base "terrain" one.

In the control box with the terrain texture you can only change the X and Y tiling. The texture options whilst displayed are not used.

X and Y tiling:

This controls the number of times a texture is repeated across a map (in the X and Y axis respectively). 50 times is a good average number. If you make it 1000 times then each texture will be repeated every meter. This would make for a very noisy/grainy looking map. If you set the value too low then the texture will appear way too blurry. In mathematical terms if you know the spectral entropy of the original texture then you can set this repeat tiling value very precisely so that it appears with the same real world ground informational entropy. Know whilst I can probably work this out, most people can't so just choose a value here which looks good (again start with 50,50 and go from there).

R:

R = the angle at which the textures are added to the map. Use this to break up any texture seams. 0 = default (imagine if your bathroom floor got tiled at some angle rather than lining up with the walls and you will get the idea)

The next two drop down boxes control the texture blur and texture transparency respectively.

Ok remember how I said each texture is placed on top of the base "terrain" texture. Ok for each new texture you add, you need to set its blur and transparency. Let’s consider a patch of sand. By its nature it will tend to blur into surrounding areas (textures) there won't be a hard edge. So you will want to set the blur value high here (say 2.5). A forest would also be blurred but not by so much so you might set this to say 2. A paved road on the other hand has a very sharp define so you would set that very small (0.5). Ok so much for blur how about transparency. Consider a patch of grass on a desert. I nature it won't be like a astro-turf. The sand will bleed through. So in this case you want to set the grass transparency lowish (less than 1.0 say 0.5). This will show you some grass but with a sandy (remember "terrain" = sand for desert) bleed through. On the other hand a concrete slab on the desert sand will have no sand showing through, so you would set this value to something > 1 (say 2.0).

Now blur and transparency are related. This is why you have transparencies > 1. If you really blur up a texture (say set it to 3) but you still want it to stand out (not have any transparency) then you will need to set your transparency to 3 as well. The more you blur the thinner the texture becomes so to compensate you need to beef up its transparency multiplier.

Lastly you have your color dropper. This allows you to associate a terrain map color with the texture layer you just defined.

Why so many controls?

Because it allows you really great freedom in producing the map you want *AND* allowing you to make a base "terrain" texture change to totally change the look of the map.

So Ryan,

The reason why your textures in the game didn't look like they do in the texture browser is because of all the odd tiling, transparency and blur factors which were being used combined with the base terrain texture actually gave you something else instead as was intended. If you wanted to get a "denser" closer to how it looks like in the texture browser then set your blur to 0 and your multiplier to 6. If you do that you will get your texture but it will look bad because it won't blend with everything else.

2. Autogen & structures.

Once again some of your trees were connected to colors which didn't exist anymore.

In general you don't want to set most trees to normalize with the terrain. Most trees grow straight up irrespective of their terrain base. Also the select random orientation box for most trees would be set to XYZ (ie randomize the X and Y location AND their rotation Z). If you just set XY then their rotation will be fixed according to the prototype tree which was first placed. Do this for orchards and hedges sure, but not most random forests.

Ryan I hope this has helped you understand the MM better.

[RyanCrierie]

It seemed as though you originally had more colors on this map than you do now (and some were deleted?) because I found texture color references to colors which were no longer on the map.

...

Once again some of your trees were connected to colors which didn't exist anymore.

Yep. I deleted those color texture assignments through the "X" button in MM; as well as reloading simplified terrain maps, to try and simplify the map cause I thought one issue was due to me trying just too much at the same time.

Perhaps MM could get a little "Garbage cleaning" option so that if it sees stuff no longer linked to a color on a map, it removes it?