Terrain borders

[Mercator]

If you haven't seen Kull's thread about adding rivers yet... I got a little carried away with testing how the river-adding thing works, and later if I could posibly use this to add more terrains.

And then I found out a nice property of the dithering image. I don't know if it's been discovered before, but I thought it was nice enough to share...

Look here...

[Mercator]

Doesn't that look nice?

I'm sure someone could use this. It basically allows you to "fence off" the different terrain types.

The use is rather limited though, the bottom line of a tile is invisible (that goes for all graphics, actually), there's no extra space above the tile, and the dithering image seems to have to rather weird ways with colors.

Erm... Yes... not to mention the horrific side-effect for black (= unexplored) squares with this graphic ... Which I didn't show you, or you might have dismissed the whole idea straight away . You'd have to find out for yourself.

Here's the image used to create the above... Instead of the normal dithering graphic. That is, the little pink tile with the black dots on it in the lower-left corner of the terrain1.gif/bmp file that controls how different terrain graphics flow over into eachother.

[Kull]

Hmmmm. I can think of one use - Borders between Civs. It wouldn't work in all cases, and you'd have to do some serious planning - but this sure seems intriguing. Even if it shows up in unexplored terrain, that's not necessarily a bad thing. In ancient times, civs had a more-or-less rough idea of everyone else's location, they were just unclear on the details. This could mimic that semi-knowledge in a way the "purely unexplored" graphic does not. (Just how "horrific" IS the side effect??)

[Mercator]

You see the dark purple triangles above the central magenta tile in the second image I posted? These show up white... for every unexplored square (including map edges)!

There might be a way to fix that, but I haven't found it yet.

[Kull]

Yes, that would qualify as "horrific"!

Still, most modern scenarios (the ubiquitous WW2 genre in particular) make little or no use use of the "Unexplored Terrain", so "border" would still work for most of them. It IS odd that no other "terrain type" is affected by this.

Speaking of esoteric....is it possible that "unexplored" could be given features of it's own such as food or trade? (I suppose a special graphic would be impossible as the color is probably based on a single standard pixel.)

Conversely, is it possible to make it "insensitive" to unit vision? That would allow for the creation of a permanent fog - and the potential for other uses is almost endless. (especially for fantasy and sci-fi scenarios)

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Kull
It IS odd that no other "terrain type" is affected by this.

Yes... it must be a result of the way Civ2 handles this dithering graphically.

Speaking of esoteric....is it possible that "unexplored" could be given features of it's own such as food or trade? (I suppose a special graphic would be impossible as the color is probably based on a single standard pixel.)

You must have fogotten surely, but the unexplored terrain has its own graphic. It's pretty much next to the dithering graphic in the terrain1 file... Changing that to other than black might solve the problem, but I'm on a different computer right now so I can't test it... What I can say is that ToT doesn't have this "horrific" problem, no white (or other unwanted color) showing up anywhere.
There's no way to give it any properties though, after all, if you could it wouldn't be unexplored anymore. You can't have cities work an unexplored square.

Conversely, is it possible to make it "insensitive" to unit vision? That would allow for the creation of a permanent fog - and the potential for other uses is almost endless. (especially for fantasy and sci-fi scenarios)

I'm not sure... I don't think so.

[Kull]

Originally posted by Mercator

You must have fogotten surely, but the unexplored terrain has its own graphic. It's pretty much next to the dithering graphic in the terrain1 file.

Doh. I musta swallowed an extra helping of stupid pills!

Changing that to other than black might solve the problem......

Hmmmm. I've never seen this done before, but suppose you created a semi-transparent gray fog graphic and placed it here? That way the unexplored map wouldn't be completely obscured in Black, but would reveal tantalizingly small glimpses of the underlying terrain, improvements, and cities (if present).

Thinking further about "Borders", it's clear that wouldn't work unless every civ had a single unique terrain type (not bloody likely!).

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Kull
Doh. I musta swallowed an extra helping of stupid pills!

Changing that to other than black might solve the problem......

Hmmmm. I've never seen this done before

It has been done... At least in one scenario by Heresson (Fading Lights, I think). No spectacular graphic or anything, but it has been done.

but suppose you created a semi-transparent gray fog graphic and placed it here? That way the unexplored map wouldn't be completely obscured in Black, but would reveal tantalizingly small glimpses of the underlying terrain, improvements, and cities (if present).

I tried that out in ToT (I'm on the "wrong" computer again... That is, only ToT available, instead of both ToT and FW), and it certainly doesn't work there. You get the same funny effects as with making normal terrains (partially) transparent.
I thought I had tried it a long time ago with FW, but now I think of it, that was with the city radius graphic.

Thinking further about "Borders", it's clear that wouldn't work unless every civ had a single unique terrain type (not bloody likely!).

It might work in highly alternative settings, with say, a more EU-like map (erm... I think, I don't have it myself), where terrain types wouldn't be of any importance. "Conquering" could be done by using engineers to transform terrain into "your" terrain type, while "regular" armies would be used to attack such "occupiers". The AI would be hopelessly lost, but with multiplayer it might work.
Perhaps the airbase graphic (altered) could also be used on all squares (since it can display the "owning civ), to show the difference between theoretical and de-facto borders.
( Wow! I might be on to something here)

[Mercator]

By the way... Is no-one but Kull and me interested in this? Or was my thread title just a little bit too criptic?

[Heresson]

When it comes to semi-transparent undiscovered terrain, Allard Hoefelt tried it once and reported it is not possible,
or at least it didn't have the effect He wanted to get.

[Kull]

Originally posted by Mercator
By the way... Is no-one but Kull and me interested in this? Or was my thread title just a little bit too criptic?

Shoulda titled it, "Naked J-Lo Pix". We'd be over 300 posts by now!

[Kull]

Originally posted by Heresson
When it comes to semi-transparent undiscovered terrain, Allard Hoefelt tried it once and reported it is not possible, or at least it didn't have the effect He wanted to get.

So that means it's not an overlay (ala Terrain2.gif or the "Specials" in Terrain1), but an actual base level terrain type. A strange one, certainly, but a terrain type nevertheless. That REALLY suggests you could do more than just "hide" things with it. A hex-level comparison with the other Terrain1.gif values might be quite interesting.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Heresson
When it comes to semi-transparent undiscovered terrain, Allard Hoefelt tried it once and reported it is not possible,
or at least it didn't have the effect He wanted to get.

Originally posted by Kull
Shoulda titled it, "Naked J-Lo Pix". We'd be over 300 posts by now!

Originally posted by Kull
So that means it's not an overlay (ala Terrain2.gif or the "Specials" in Terrain1), but an actual base level terrain type. A strange one, certainly, but a terrain type nevertheless. That REALLY suggests you could do more than just "hide" things with it. A hex-level comparison with the other Terrain1.gif values might be quite interesting.

It's not a separate terrain type, since it's encoded entirely differently and separately in savegames. It's probably more something like:

if (discovered) then display(terrain) else display(blank)

And then it's treated graphically the same as a land-type terrain (as can be seen from the coasts at map edges).

[Stefan Härtel]

Hmm... coming back to the original post, this could be nice for a "zoo"-type scenario...

But to drop my share of ideas, Maybe the changing of river-, road,- or railway graphic to a transparent veil could make a permanent fog...

But there's something else that troubles me a bit. It's a bug, but if someone has enough endurance, he could turn it into a feature.
Sometimes, in several scenarios (I remember encountering this rather often in SoG), where the map is mostly unexplored, between two of the player's turns, a part of the map suddenly becomes visible for a short moment. I think I can remember reading of other player's experiences with this. If someone can investigate this, it could make a nice "lightfire"-effect...

[Kull]

Originally posted by Stefan Härtel

Sometimes, in several scenarios (I remember encountering this rather often in SoG), where the map is mostly unexplored, between two of the player's turns, a part of the map suddenly becomes visible for a short moment. I think I can remember reading of other player's experiences with this. If someone can investigate this, it could make a nice "lightfire"-effect...

I wonder if that's a byproduct of our old friend, "changeterrain"?