Water table trouble...

[Forboding Angel]

Aaron, please, can you do something with the water table? It has taken 2 hours so far on an 8192x8192 map (using mosiac).

Look, I don't need the water effects, I just want it to lay the sand texture for me so I don't have to mess with it. In spring for some reason if you edit anything on the texture in photoshop, mipmap lines start showing up in game and it looks exceedingly fugly.

I'm doing 1:1:1 ratios, due to the AA changes you made, so this it taking about 20 years longer than normal. All I need it to do is tell the attributes map, hey! Put sand over here because it's below the waterline.

Unrelated note: WOuld you mind explaining the perameters section of the climate manager in even greater detail (or maybe just smaller words:))?

[Madcowthomas]

Code: Select all

Mipmap lines start showing up in game and it looks exceedingly fugly.

I have this problem when I use a heightmap from any other program. The trick I learned was to Design Map and run the "Generate the HF". Found that took away those lines that see on your terrain.

[Forboding Angel]

ungh, those lines have nothing to do with l3dt.

That is not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about contour lines. Spring loads everything in it's on proprietary dds tiling system. This system kinda sucks.

That problem has NOTHING to do with l3dt.

[Aaron]

Hi Forboding,

I'm still thinkering about ways to speed up the water table generation. I've got a few ideas, but I won't have anything implemented for at least a couple of months.

Regaring the user-guide: you may find it more useful to browse the climate tutorial in the wiki, and particularly, chapter 2. In the official userguide I tend to cover everything rather quickly and formally because there's so much to document. In the wiki tutorials I cover special topics in greater detail, and usually show how I've done everything.

Anyway, if you don't need the water effects (and that's quite reasonable, since Spring only has water at one level), you can skip the water table stage and just define the sand layer by setting the AltRange parameters of the sand layers. Chapter two of the climate tutorial covers exactly this under the Quick way: Alt range heading.

Also note that you can manually paint the attributes map in L3DT using a brush interface now, so you shouldn't have to do post-work in Photoshop to add sand. To guide your painting, you can also use the heightfield or water map as an image drape (view->image drape).

One more thing: you can speed up the texture generation by decreasing the AA radius in the texture wizard. If you set it to zero, the texture algorithm will be as fast as the 1:1 texture algo. However, if you use zero AA on a high-res texture you'll get unsightly blocks unless you also make a high-res attributes map. With zero AA and a high-res attributes map and texture, it will look just like the old 'per pixel land types' algorithm. With non-zero AA and a high-res attributes map and texture, it looks much better, but as you say, it takes more time.

This reminds me, I have to get back to Tobi vis-a-vis working out the SMT format. Dispensing with MapConv and its texture size limit would be a Very Good Thing [tm].

Cheers,
Aaron.