Warped_Dragon wrote:
But thats not my suggestion. How about a new color for "dead" forests? You know, trees without leaves, dead and decaying undergrowth.... a forest that would fit the wasteland terrain.
And maybe one for snow as well...
Of course, these could be easily made by converting exisitng forest scripts to use new items, and just adding a color to use the new scripts... right?
There are 2 ways to go about this:
1) Add a new terrain group.
2) Modify the items.txt script.
Adding a new terrain group takes up valuable palette swatches. The more altitude variations that you want, the more swatches. Being as we are limited to the number of swatches we can use, the more specialized a terrain group, the less sensible it is to make a seperate terrain group.
Moding the items.txt can be a bit more work but gives you greater control over region by region statics. Let's say for example that I want to have 3 different forest types; northern (mostly pine trees), temperate (regular OSI type), and dead (for a desolate area in the southwest part of my map). I'm going to make a coldforest.txt, forest.txt, deadforest.txt.
Part of my items.txt is going to read:
01 0075 0000 0000 6143 1000 coldforest.txt
01 0075 2001 1001 6143 4095 forest.txt
01 0030 0000 1001 2000 4095 deadforest.txt
What this will do is any forest area from X 0-6143, Y 0-1000 (from the top down to 1000, left to right) will use my coldforest script. Any forest below 1000 and to the right of 2000 will be normal forest. Any forest below 1000 and to the left of 2000 will be dead forest.
This is of course a very simplified example and does not take into account that maybe I want my dead forest in a small area in the center of my map and everything around it to be normal forest. That would require 4 renamed copies of forest.txt to be placed in the items.txt with coordinate ranges that surround the deadforest. Example:
01 0075 0000 0000 6143 1999 forest.txt
01 0075 0000 2000 3000 2500 forest2.txt
01 0030 3001 2000 3500 2500 deadforest.txt
01 0075 3501 2000 6143 2500 forest3.txt
01 0075 0000 2501 6143 4095 forest4.txt
The more statics groups you want, the more work it gets to become. A hard fast rule about items.txt is that the same script (by name) cannot be executed twice, even in different X/Y coordinates. If you tried to run forest.txt through twice it would crash. This is why you have to copy and rename even if you want to use the same script for all 4 forest areas. This takes a lot more planning and tinkering to get it the way you want it but it does give you very good control over statics placement (both in type and density).
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This information is most certainly welcome.
