Spudz-
Wrong. See
http://www.ryandor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1115. Adding another terrain group to be the same basic terrain is the stupid and lazy way to do it. Why? Because you've got 256 swatches to use and it isn't anywhere near enough for everything you want to do. While it is a hell of a lot more work and requires more preplanning, it is going to provide better results to use the coordinate items system.
Jeroen-
Yes, basicly you've got a good understanding of it all (and everything else Spudz said is correct, in fact everything he said is correct, it is just a different method, and that is discussed in the tutorial linked above). You can swap out whatever you want for your own colortable and maptrans. In fact if you are lazy (like Dian
) you don't even need to change the colortable, you can just change the maptrans, but you of course need to remember what you change where.
Many of the questions you've brough up have been discussed and I clipped a lot of the frequent ones into the tutorials forums.
As far as the altitude and other questions about Mod11, there are old discussion threads about the what and the why of it, but the short answer is as someone said, was mostly my preference. I find jumps of 5 Z to be far too ugly for my liking. Also because of the limitations of the client there really just isn't any need for using the full 256 Z levels because you can't see that far. Finally because of the limitations of Dragon there are many tradeoffs. It is not fit to make a great map from start to finish without a lot of tweaking, running multiple compiles with different maptrans (Dian can tell you a lot about that) and tweaking after in Worldforge. Altitude is something that is very easy to change in a large area with Worldforge. A lot quicker and easier than it is to change terrains.
Yes, there are programs that use 1 image for terrain and 1 for altitude and they are infinetly more flexible than Dragon but none of them are very complete or useable. There is Syds map converter, which he never finished because he is lazy (notice a trend with us people around here?) then there is UOL which isn't really all that useable in version 1 and DKnight still hasn't finished version 2 because he is very busy (although he might be lazy like the rest of us too). Then there is Punt's new program which I haven't really messed with (because I am lazy too after all) and he probably hasn't finished either (because, yes, you guessed it, he is lazy) but I'm sure it is a great program (because he paid me to say that.....errr....no, but seriously because all of punts tools are great)