[Freeciv-Dev] Terrain

[Lord Spurius <spurius@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        Oh, btw, I sent the last message a bit prematurely.  I was using 
netscape mail,
and it was eating up my swap space to dangerous levels  :)  There were a few
other things I wanted to address.  First, engineer transforms are covered. 
Mountains have the most dramatic landscape, and thus are the most dependant on
a good implementation of fractal terrain generation.  Hills are merely
mountains that have been averaged down.  Transform again, you get (plains?),
which is it flattened further.  Transform again, you get grasslands (which are
just greener).  Transform again, well, I'd have to redo a small section of
terrain there, but its not too big of a deal.  Land changes would be able to be
stored in a consecutive list, or, as you may prefer, once it generates the
terrain, it looks at the regular tile map it was sent and checks what differs
from the current landscape and does the consecutive transformations to get it
that way (although I'd prefer not do it this way, as it could make slight
appearance changes and would be a lot more work).
        As to placing a city on a realistic terrain, have any of you played the
game Magic Carpet?  It had a highly irregular landscape, and yet you could
place a castle anywhere on it.  It did this by flattening out just the area it
needed.  This creates a nice "fortified" look to it if the terrain is
very irregular, as it has a steep upward slope on one side and a cliff on the
other.
        Thanks for the optimization tips, all of you  :) 
Hopefully I'll have time to implement them by the end of the weekend (still
have to get it to break into continents like I'm trying to, its being a bit
stubborn about that   ; ) ) (I'll optimize the object loader from the wxwindows
sample as well, it uses triangles, quads, and polygons).  Also, as to making
polygon resolution an option, it already is, and I don't plan to outdate that
feature.  Now, someone mentioned that 2-4 triangles per square should be
enough.  But, unfortunatly, it doesn't work.  You can't make a mountain at all
with just 2 polygons, and all you can make with 4 is a low quality pyramid (why
bother with fractal terrain then?).  Again, its a realism thing.        As to
that realism, I am attaching a screenshot or 2.  Remember, right now I'm just
trying to get it to generate correctly, and so I'm using a rather dramatic
landscape  :)  It looks a lot like venezuela for any of you who have seen
pictures of it.  Remeber that in the actual game, these would be the sharpest
landscapes by far, most would be much, much flatter.  Also, I plan to
differentiate it a bit more, I.e. making a more apparent distinction between
mountains and jungle, as are in this scene.  Anyways, without further ado, here
they are  :)  (they're a bit dark for now, you may want to turn up the
brightness/contrast for the full effect).

 - Rob

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