Ryandor.com

Hey, I've read the grassbump section in the tutorial, but I still have a few questions about how to use it to make nice map effects. The purpose of this post is to pick the brains of the more experienced users of Dragon.

First: The T2A landscape uses grassbump to its fullest potential, i think. Is there a way to reproduce even SOME of the rad effects it has? I love the roads enclosed by bump-cliffs with jungle around them.

Second: What's the best way to make a smooth (walkable) transition from grassbump to non-bump grass? Painting an area with grassbump just makes a hole in the ground that you can't access.

Third: Is it possible to make a "forestbump?" It seems like there are landscape tiles for it.

If you know anything about working with grassbump, or if you've made a map using different bump-style effects, I'd love to hear from you.

The grassbump was originally created to be similair to the T2A landscape but it does it differently.
The T2A landscape uses mostly cliff tiles with grass on the edge to achieve the effect, where as the grassbump uses regular cliff tiles.
It wouldn't be that hard to include this into the next mod as it technically doesn't require a transition. The tile is the transition in this case, and it would just be a matter of painting it in the bmp.

As for the walkable transition, it's not really possible as-is in the grassbump, other than making a part of the grassbump color touch forest color. Of course then you get the 3-way transition that Dragon can't do. Either way, some manual tweaking is required.

As far as a walkable transition goes for the T2A way, I think you'd still end up having to manual tweak it. There's still a 3-way in there.

Where I've found the grassbump most useful is making a kind of maze type terrian. Like this:

Notice that it's surrounded by water. That's so there's no "external" cliff around the whole thing other than waht's normally made by the coastline. The part that is walkable is the forested area at the head of the rivers. No cliff there either. It uses the same transition as the regular grass when it comes to anything else, like forest or water.

Here's what it looks like in-game:


I hope that explains it a bit better. Also, put in a suggestion for any new colors (like forest-cliff) in the New Colortable thread. That way I don't forget it.

-Ryandor