Climate Help Needed

[piratelord]

I'm tweaking the Temperate Coastal template supplied with L3DT, and I think I've made a few improvements (well, at least it's an improvement on my landscape ), but I'm having trouble with one last thing.

I'm making use of different textures for different grass types of the same type (i.e. coastal grass, coastal grass 2, coastal grass 3).

My problem is that #2 and #3 were not really being used, so I end up with my sandy grass butting up against normal grass.
#2 and #3 are gradual "blends" up to full grass.

So far I've managed to make two different sand types. Underwater and Beach, and if any sea rock butts against the beach, I've managed to expand the rock formation onto the beach using Coastal Rock, which also wasn't showing up. So I'm happy with that.

I just can't get it to perform a gradual change from "Dry Beach" to Grass.

What I'm after is:
Dry Beach
Coastal Grass 1
Coastal Grass 2
Coastal Grass 3
Grass

What I'm finding is that one of the Coastal Grasses is overriding all the other Grasses, so I'm misunderstanding something

Any pointers?

Here's the settings I'm using at the moment.

Dry Beach (Works Fine)
0.826
0
0
0.209
0.5

Coastal Grass (for next to beach)
0.83
0
0
0.2
0.5

Coastal Grass 2
0.834
0
0
0.199
0.5

Coastal Grass 3
0.838
0
0
0.198
0.5

Grass (Default)
0.85
0
0
0.2
-0.05


and if anyone's interested, my tweaked Coastal Rock
0.65
0.3
0
0.3
0.5

I also believe I made an improvement to Underwater Rock (Lake). It works better for my map then default.
0.25
0.4
0
0.82
0

Thanks!

[piratelord]

Never mind. I managed to sort it out after a lot more trial and error.

Extreme fine tuning of the BaseProb produced the results I needed.

[Aaron]

Hi Piratelord,

Another approach would be to decrease the salinity coefficient. You'll notice that it's high for beach (0.5) and slightly negative for grass (-0.05), so any land types meant to go between these two land types should also have a salinity coefficient between these values. However, as you've found you can usually hack these things with BaseProb, so if it works for you then that's cool.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[piratelord]

Thanks Aaron.

I did try those settings, but was getting some odd results. BaseProb worked a treat, with very small differences between numbers producing the result.

I think I ended up with about 7 types between the coast and grass, since I made textures that blended from one to the other.


Oh, completely off topic, but when I download the latest version, is it safe enough to overwrite the old exe with the new exe? Since I stupidly changed the original textures and costal file it would mean overwriting a lot of files in the new installation, compared with just overwriting one file.

Thanks!

[Aaron]

Hi Piratelord,

Overwriting the exe should be OK. You may also want to copy across the 'Extensions' folder and the 'Settings\extensions.ini.xml' file.

Alternatively (because I like to give alternatives), there is a way to have multiple versions use the same climates without being wiped by installers/uninstallers. To do this, copy the entire resources directory (the one containing the climates you wish to save) to some 'safe' location like 'Program files\Bundysoft\L3DT Resources'. Then, install whichever version of L3DT you like wherever you like, and go to 'Settings->File paths', double-click on 'L3DT->Resources', and select that resources directory. Restart L3DT, and it should be using those climates, and they won't be nuked when L3DT is installed/uninstalled.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[piratelord]

Thanks Aaron!