Ryandor.com

Before all, i'd like to say sorry 'cause my english. I'm not a native speaker. Give me a few credits.

Well, after being almost 1 year away from making map stuff, i decided to come back and downloaded Dragon Mod 11 (i used to use MOD 9+) but i'm having same troubles with coastlines... I've searched for similar problems on the forum and i've not found a definitive guide, so i think i should create another thread.

I've read that Stormcrow did some great changes on the way coastlines works and i'm auxious to see how it shall became, but i'm still unable to see it

As one image says more then a thousand words, then...





1. Well, i think the coasts were suposed to be higher, isn't it?
2. There are some transitions bugs on the north.
3. Why there are waves on the transition between the two types of water?
4. Where's the Group.txt script on MOD 11?

Can someone help me?

I too was away from the map making scene for almost a couple of years and recently I've decided to redraw my map.
I was amazed by mod11's speed in compiling the map0 file, but I experienced your identical bugs.
I've readen out all the posts in this forum concerning 'coasts', and apparently this is the situation:

1. The waves between ocean and sea are a known bug (and I wonder if it will be fixed someday).
2. The blockyness of the NW shores are an obvious result of the UO coast structure( sea -5, orange tile -15, grass 0 ).

For problem 2 the solution appears to be a massive Worldforge editing (by hand) randomizing the Z value of these shores...

Personally when I find a more convenient solution than deleting by hand the waves for problem 1 I'll resolve the NW shore blockyness of my map scripting a little program that will generate a fix table with the randomized Z values of the NW coast tiles...

I remember Dragon MOD 9 had a good coastline script, isn't?
I mean, the only difference was the "brown earth" cliff which now was replaced by the sand one on the MOD 11.

I think what i haven't got yet is why the coastline script has changed?

I'm not a native Englishman too, but possibly be able to descript the problems.

At beginning i'll say that i'am using D9 still because it have nice scripts with less bugs and i need to edit map0mul only.

1) this is possibly the transitions placing issue - water borders are beign places closer for 1 tile to shore, than like we all could see at D9. No any other thoughts...
2)Same bug may be finded at rock tiles of both D9 and D11, but only way i founded for it be fixed is to make mid-altitude tiles between shore(0) and deep (-15).
3)The reason is that water have only two script systems - water2x and x2 water, so it not specialized to any separately taken tileset. It will made same transition method, even if transitions is between same tiles of the same altitude...
4) Dont know. As i sad i'm not using D11. Thry to find file with similar strings in Scripts root folder.

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Alright... I've spent far too much time figuring this out. I haven't been able to get worldforge to work for whatever reason. Here's my solution to the Mod11 Northwest coast problem. I edited the actual script files, and through a lot of trial and error and some help of Mod9 I created a functioning NW Coast. It looks better than the jagged edges, its faster than editing all your coastline in worldforge, and the OSI map has bad NW coasts anyway. The only problem I found are occasional "spikey" points, which I fixed by modifying the coast outline on the BMP file.

Here's the zip. Just replace the corresponding scripts in the Scripts/Map folder. You may want to make a back up of the originals in case there's a better solution later.
http://www.angelfire.com/vt2/vagrant_mu ... astmod.zip

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Thank you so much raineach! I have a world with many small islands and going trough all of them with WorldForge would have been a lot of pain. I believe that this modification of yours will also help other users too because now they won't perhaps need to go trough each and every NW coast tile on their map.

Thank you

EDIT:
Btw, those pointy things look actually quite good on snow. Gives the snow an icy feeling... Just my opinion...

In a previous post above it was mentioned that the NW jagged coast is caused due to the grass being at Z=0 and the bottom of the ocean (orange tile) being at Z=-15. This is 100% correct and this problem happens the most when you use 1 pixel stepping, if you use 2 pixels to step, or 1 pixel, then 2 pixels, then 1 pixel again (alternating) it helps remove this problem as well.

The best solution (I suspect raineach has done something similar with his fix) would be to create a grass-tile that has a -5 Z coordiate. Then this special grass tile can be used when draing the NW coastlines when there are single pixel jagged stepping. with the grass tile being at a -5 Z rather than a 0 it causes the edge to fold downward and look smooth.

Anyway I just though I would try and explain why this happens, I hope this helps all to understand.

There isn't any Group.txt script with MOD11 that I've seen, but the Info.txt file contains a listing of all the groups. and the Maptrans.txt contains all the tiles and settings used for each group.

Carl Hamilton (Imprint)
http://members.cox.net/darkshard/

You are correct about the problems with the coast. There is no really good solution for Dragon. UOL Rich was able to code in a special partial second compile pass that checks for a specific tile and adjusts things accordingly. If UOL 2 is ever released (I haven't been active with development since version 1) I expect it will be a much better program. It could even be out for all I know but Khaybel can't seem to keep Orbsydia in 1 form for more than a few months before he feels compelled to tear it down and rebuild it so it is closed right now. Punts program also looks very promising even if he has stopped work on it, I just haven't looked at it because I haven't felt inspired to do any map related work in many moons.



That is one of the differences between the 1.03 core the 1.05 core. The groups.txt went away.

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