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A dilemna. How to add features to an already heavily edited terrain and altitude bmps.

My friend submitted to me a nice terrain.bmp and altitude.bmp that I need to keep working on as it only contained the basic terrain. I need to add in some more landscape tiles like roads, beaches, rivers etc.

I added in some beaches and roads. No problems except for a few 3 way transitions that I can hand edit in the mul later. The northern beaches look wrong but I might have to hand edit those as no transition tiles were placed and each tile jagged edge stands out. But overall the altitudes were still going to be correct for the new features and so the altitude.bmp was still usable. And it generally did a good job.

However, I then added some rivers. Unlike grass tiles, water tiles do not slope to match adjacent levels. So it appears I need to generate a new altitude.bmp to keep the rivers at -5. But I'd rather not because of all the work my friend did on the altitude.bmp would be lost. And it was a lot of work getting the elevations just right across the entire ilshenar sized map.

So it seems I have limited choices -
1. Stick with map generator 2 and regenerate the altitude and try to re-create all the work my friend did.
2. Convert the terrain.bmp to dragon9+ colours and do much the same thing as 1. I hate to say it but having just one bmp to work with is an advantage when it comes to editing a map later.
3. Somehow edit the altitude.bmp to put in the shallow water colours. But, I have no idea how to do that - I am not that clever with transferring just rivers from one file to another in the paint program. (eg paintshop pro) and don't know how to overlay the rivers from terrain to altitude bmps.

Anyone any advice they can give me?

Another method you could consider is to rebuild the map with the fixes, and then use a copy utility to copy portions of the map from one map to the other.

Not ideal, I know, but it would allow you to keep your other detail work intact.

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