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Water, lava or chocolate sauce?

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Water, lava or chocolate sauce?

Postby David Walters » Fri Jul 02, 2010 2:22 pm

Hi Aaron,

I'm trying to spice up the evil bits of my world and I'm finding the water a bit tame :twisted:
I'd like to replace lakes and oceans with simple alternative liquid types.

Is there a possibility to add this? -- and I'm taking about something very simple and large scale -- no mixing of liquids or viscosity simulations -- just a way of clicking on a lake and/or ocean and saying - "that one is filled with XXX".

I've looked at the WMF file specification briefly and I'm not sure about this 'Auxiliary pixel data' facility - but could that be used to add a single byte marking an id for what sort of liquid is used? I'm perfectly happy with a first pass where L3DT doesn't know or care what type #57 means to me, and that I can only change the attribute in the water editor tool. I just need _something_ built into this tool to let me easily craft this data.

Going forward maybe you'd have a simple material editor where you could name the liquids and assign a base colour and texture for sapphire to use. Also I guess you'd want to set different Fresnel co-efficients per liquid type too (I wouldn't care about this so much because my Lava would be opaque). I realise I'm probably asking for a lot here, sorry! :oops:

edit: I just noticed the combo box for water is editable in the calc dialog and in the flood tool. But when I type in 'fire' it errors with:
CMapGroup::WM_ManualFloodCalc error: - Water type is dodgy
-- hmmm, is this an easier thing to add than I first thought? could you add a few more options in there, or simply add a bespoke solution just for Lava? maybe there isn't cause for over-engineering other types at this stage. That would work well for me as I'd get my fire and brimstone faster! :evil:


Regards,
David
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Postby Aaron » Sun Jul 04, 2010 11:43 am

Hi David,

Interesting idea. Would this just be for use within L3DT, or would you like to export the water/etc data for use in another program?

The WMF does contain a byte per pixel for water type, but the list of types supported by L3DT are hard-coded (none / lake / sea / etc). Allowing new user-defined 'water' types would cause some problems in L3DT, but that's probably not too serious an issue if you're intention is to use the data in another program.

Regards,
Aaron.
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Postby David Walters » Sun Jul 04, 2010 5:29 pm

aaron wrote:Hi David,

Interesting idea. Would this just be for use within L3DT, or would you like to export the water/etc data for use in another program?

The WMF does contain a byte per pixel for water type, but the list of types supported by L3DT are hard-coded (none / lake / sea / etc). Allowing new user-defined 'water' types would cause some problems in L3DT, but that's probably not too serious an issue if you're intention is to use the data in another program.

Regards,
Aaron.


Hi, yes I'd be exporting this data to my own engine for rendering. Presently I run the WM -> HF plug-in and export that (with no distinction made between oceans and lakes). If extra types were added I'd be exporting the WMF file, reading that and interpreting the water types from this attribute byte.

I'm hoping the impact of my request is light. I guess I'm essentially asking for additional fluid types be added to your hard-coded list. I'm not sure of the ramifications of this though. If it makes it easier I probably only need Lava. That's my "minimum request" so to speak :)
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