VectorStorm Blog

It’s time for another video!  Here’s a simple experiment in “painting”-style terrain authoring within MMORPG Tycoon 2.

I’m kind of surprised at how quickly that went.  Just as an experiment, I’ve implemented “paint on terrain”, to see how it’d work.

There’s no persistence at the moment — fly too far away from the terrain you’ve been editing and it’ll be lost, reverting to a flat grey grid.. but this shows roughly how it might work.  Right now I have four tools implemented;  ”raise”, “lower”, “green”, and “brown”.  Which all do more or less what you would expect, but with a massive 40 meter wide brush.

Right now, “green” and “brown” directly set the color of the landscape, which turns out to be rather boring;  the auto-generated landscapes used a four-dimensional gradient to figure out terrain colors, which gave subtly expressive colors for grass on different types of surfaces.. here, green is just.. green.  I suspect that a better option would be to give the user a “grass” brush and a “dirt” brush, which used the same gradient coloring that’s used in the auto-terrain-generation, but still give the player direct “paint” control, if he really wants it.

Right now, the tools work like painting on a paint document;  you have to scrub the pointer back and forth, building up effect over an area.  It feels pretty sloppy, and I’m not really happy with that approach, but it was the fastest way to just get something up and running.

If I go this direction for real (and I’m highly tempted, now that I’ve started experimenting with it), then I’m going to need to find a nicer way to easily sculpt large bits of the terrain, without turning the game into a full-blown 3D modelling package.  :)

Initial thoughts:  ”Terrain” tab for broad terrain types;  paint with “plain” or “forest” or “mountain”, with a huge 200+ meter brush that gives nice surface undulation, coloration, and etc.  ”Shape” tab for adjusting the shape of the terrain with smaller brushes.  ”Flatten”, “Raise”, “Lower”, etc.  ”Clutter” tab for overriding the ground clutter which was placed by the “terrain” tab.  ”Paint” tab for re-painting the terrain.  Something like that, I guess, is what it’d need.

So here’s what it looks like, having terrain-setting “buildings” approximately every 150 meters apart.  Note that in the visible grid here, each grid space is eight meters on a side (ignoring changes of altitude).  Just looking at it, there are far too many of them.  In this region, there are about 130 districts, and each one has a box for adjusting its terrain.

The more I poke with this, the more I’m starting to believe that this might be totally the wrong approach;  maybe I should bite the bullet and really give the player direct “paint the terrain” control.  Maybe that would be best.

It’d certainly be a whole lot simpler than expecting the player to go around fussing with all of these individual “places to go to set terrain settings”.

The only real reason not to do it is for reasons of save files;  right now, saving the data out would use up several hundred megabytes on disc for each save game.  I could probably cut that way down, but I can’t imagine getting it much lower than about 50 megabytes per save, which does feel kind of excessive..

I’ve spent a little time today optimising the web site.  Seems to have made the site a good deal more responsive than before, at least for me.

As always, if you run into troubles, please don’t hesitate to contact me either via e-mail or via the comments in this post.

So here’s a view of the same corner, with my “blend against every nearby region, not just the ones sharing an edge” fix in place.  As you can see, everything is much smoother!

Unfortunately, it’s also much slower to calculate the initial list of nearby neighbor regions;  it takes about half a minute for the game to start up due to all the calculations.  (By comparison, in the earlier screenshot, it took only a second or two);  I’m going to need to put in some more smarts, to make it a bit less ludicrously slow.

And here’s the same corner again, with regular grassy terrain and non-flat-surfaces turned back on: