Ryandor.com

Using dragon, winME OS, yes I've got the correct map file in

There are various places in my dungeons area where I have subterranian rivers flowing, but I dont like how water transitions with cave floor, so I made all of the coasts regions with dirt. I left 2 tiles to have room for transition, even went back and added a third tile. Still no transition.


Anyone have any idea what may be causing this?

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Xelah
--Admin of some nameless shard that is still in developement

The dirt to cave floor transition doesn't exist. I've tried previously to get this working with partial success. I'll see what I have so far and let you know.
I'm currently out of town, so it'll be a couple days till I can look.

-Ryandor

that would explain a lot lol

_________________
Xelah
--Admin of some nameless shard that is still in developement

Anyone have a possible solution to this problem???

DUH!

You peeps really need to get on the ball! If I don't reply after about a week about something I say I'm going to look into, then by all means it's fair game to harrass me!


As it is, It'll have to wait till Tues now at the soonest. Busy weekend, but if I don't reply by Thur, then go ahead and spam the boards..
..err.. well, maybe not.. but do reply..


-Ryandor

In fact the Cave floor to Dirt does exsist.. The proble is this. When you create the cave floor on the *.bmp file, the cave floor is actually created via statics with actual tiles.. not the map tiles. (meaning you can melt a cave floor with WF, and the floor tiles are items.)
I have had occational trouble with this as well.. and have found a simple, yet somewhat time consuming solution to it. Paint them in with WF (Map Edit. I know it takes a lot of time doing this, but if you want various elevations with hills (taking Destard as example) as well as smooth flowing floor to other tiles, its the way to go.

_________________
Forget what you know, know what you forget.

Ah, that's right..
This is transition I "broke" when I created the ability to put mountains over caves (and hence make the cave floor static).
I need to re-visit this and make it an "obvious" option that can be turned off so the transition works. This is my fault. Expect a resolution on this soon.

-Ryandor

oooo oooo oooo! *idea*

how about changing the script so that it creates both static and map cave floors in the location desired?

foreseen problem: locations where elevation changes would cause the static tiles to stick out.

_________________
Xelah
--Admin of some nameless shard that is still in developement

Hence, that's how I broke the old transition. But as of right now, it's either one way or another, not both. Creating the static tiles is only needed on the "map" side, but not in the dungeon areas, so I have to find away to disable it on the dungeon side. Thinking about it, I think I know how to do it without having to require the changing scripts manually.

-Ryandor

Oh.

_________________
Xelah
--Admin of some nameless shard that is still in developement

seems there could be a way to have the cave floor, and Mountain rock use a common pallet color.. although with doing that, i realize it would be a constant changing in the script for each cave, for z-level differences.. but nothing that several runs through Dragon, and map copy couldnt take care of
might be worth looking into.. at least thats only way i could think of doing it. since you can only create one tile on map/statics, (cant overlap tiles)

_________________
Forget what you know, know what you forget.

I actually tried that at one point, but didn't get very far. If I remember right, the cave floor was tied to the z of the mountain. Since I prefer doing z values manually (non of that unevenly.txt for me, thanks) I ened up not being able to control the z of the cave floor.

Additionally it would require a seperate color to be added to an already full color table.

However, consider this: The transition exist only in the map tiles, and not static tiles. Therefore, it's more pratical to make it work with map tiles only and not worry about making it in a cave under rock. Therefore I'm going to focus on getting it working for the dungeon side caves. Shouldn't be to difficult with no statics to get in the way.

For the option to "turn off" the static cave tiles, I'm going to basically have a batch file that swaps the correct scripts, thereby making Dragon truely configurable. Run Dragon once on your "world" map, run the batch file that changes the scripts, run Dragon on the "dungeon" map, then combine the two maps with (most likely) UOCopy. I'm going to use this technique for several aspects of what Dragon does. In theory, you can have a batch file that swaps everything, making possible a second color table for "advanced" features. Although, this is a bit overkill as I see it. A better way is through using MapConvert that I mentioned in my "Future of Map Making" post. I'll be explaining (step by step) it further in the tutorial.

Not to discount your idea, but just an explanation of where I'm going with this. Keep the feedback coming though!

-Ryandor

Well, with all things concidered.. Honestly I think that the best way to accomplish the caves, floors, and mountain roof is this.

1. Make the Mountain, and place your entrance(s) on the map *.bmp
2. Save the map, and make a copy of it.
3. Draw in your cave floors, black tiles etc. on the copy of the 'real' map.
3. Run both map *.bmp's through Dragon.
4. Melt the cave floor on the one set of muls. and export it. (Add the last row of tiles conecting the floor to the entrance, and anything else you want in there)
5. finish your cave entrance with WF (World Forge).
6. Freeze the floor to the 'real' mul statics, and you have a perfect mountain that is untoutched with WF, and a great cave floor that you perfected.

All in all, it saves time from adding the mountain roof via WF, especially if you have any large caves, as i do

Just another way of doing things

_________________
Forget what you know, know what you forget.

The new method I've got for them is very similiar to that. I'm still working out how to make it easier though, as it's rather complicated. However, the way you just mentioned is one of the ways I've got listed in my notes that I'll cover in the tutorial as well.

-Ryandor

hey ry,
you still have the original script for when you had it created both the map and the static tile? Assuming the transition was underneath the static tile, I could just melt out all of the static tiles along the border since I have no altitude changes in most of my dungeons.

_________________
Xelah
--Admin of some nameless shard that is still in developement