Ryandor.com

Well progress is being made on the transition tables, I started ripping them apart. I've got a nearly completed and fixed water2x and x2water statics (doesn't fix all the coastal problems but a good portion). These I will release before the mod since it isn't any work to integrate them and you will get immediate results. Probably tomorrow night.

I've also got a revamped moss2swamp, swamp2moss, grass2moss, moss2grass set. The implications of this are that the rest of the land tables are going to be a piece of cake to fix once I've made a finalized template.

In the works we've got transition tables for new. Yes, you heard me, NEW terrain types never before seen by Dragon. We're going to have wood floors and more stone types.

Hopefully I will get most of the grunt work done in the next few weeks so by the time Ry gets back from vacation he can make a nice tidy package for everyone with some new tutorials and example map.

I will try to get some screenies up soon at stormhaven.ax-n.net (which Cal was so gracious as to provide room for).

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what about a additional german colortable (labelled) or just a german colortabel.bmp, as there are many german map makers? i could do that, when the colortable is finished.

Sure.
Hey! While you are at it. Can you check out the German side of uocm.de (yes I know .de is German but the site is in English and German) and see if it is still active and updated, particularly the forums. I've been wondering if the German Dragon community is still active or if Darus took down all boards.

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uocm boards are down or linked to uodev.de, formerly uofd.info, the biggest german uo-development community. not that much dragon development in germany. nacors last mod is back 1 year. darus is not active, as far as i know. at least at dragon development. uocm published some other programs (graphic encoders and so on), but that was some time ago, too.

Well progress has been a lot slower than anticipated (but isn't it always)
For lack of word from Ry, I'm just working on it on my own. Hopefully I will get some feedback from him before it's done so I don't have to release my own mod (just gonna cause confusion).

Revisiting the shallow water since many of us use RunUO (I think POL also checks shallow/deep water against fishing and spawns).

It just came to me while reorganizing the color table again that there is no need for a seperate cave entrance swatch. All it is is black and no-draw so I'm going to make the cave2mtn black2mtn and nodraw2mtn, this will let us have more variances in altitude AND take up less slots.

I'm also going to use the old swamp colors for jungle and the old jungle colors will go bye bye (because there is just too much brown/green already). I really can't see more than 4 colors for swamp tops. Really I only see swamp 0 and moss 0 as being needed. If you are going to have swamps at higher altitudes in say a dungeon, you can do them by hand as statics.

Also going to move things around the palette for better organization since old maps are not going to be compatible with mod10 anyway.

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OK, I made a lot of progress this weekend. I got the shallow water in and better coastlines. They aren't perfect but I think they are the best Dragon can do. In some ways they became worse because it wasn't possible to fix what was broken without messing up a few other things. I had to rob Peter to pay Paul. I really analyzed the OSI map and the way they do it involves 3 rows in some places. Dragon can only do 2. The only way I could get it any better than this is to make a 3rd terrain group. So you would paint 2 tiles around the land, then 8 tiles of the next group, surrounded by ocean all the way out. I think it's probably too much work.

Here are screenies of what the water looks like now. The change to how you paint a map is now in between your water and your land is a new water group that you paint about 8 tiles (if you want OSI shallows, important for RunUO, and possibly POL).

ftp://ldtek.com/UOStuff/water1.jpg
ftp://ldtek.com/UOStuff/water2.jpg
ftp://ldtek.com/UOStuff/water3.jpg
ftp://ldtek.com/UOStuff/water4.jpg
ftp://ldtek.com/UOStuff/water5.jpg

Please give me feedback on these and anything else for Mod10

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nice nice, there is soome little flaws but doesnt look too bad. now i have to make a map with it *sits and waits*

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Well it's a choice of which flaws do you want
Make a testarea of a plus sign in a 9x9 area and process it. Compare to 1st shot. They both have flaws. I'm asking if you like these flaws better hehe

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looks good. nice work stormcrow

Thanks guys. It can actually be made to look a little better if you go around and add in the corner tiles by hand, of course it's a bitch, but for that special area that must look perfect.....
Made real progress on the color table now that Cal showed me how to work with color ranges in Photoshop (BIG THANKS TO CAL). We've got a totally revamped color table. Now the 9 major terrain groups (grass, forest, desert, jungle, snow, dirt, mtn, cave and cobblestones) have 21 swatches each for a range of 0-40 in increments of 2, except for Mtn which is 2,5,10-100 increments of 5. The result is much smoother height transitions and finer control. Of course this takes up a lot of room. The palette is now full. I've had to reduce or leave out certain things alltogether but I feel this is the greatest range of things that cover gruntwork. A lot of request people have are for things that you make only a small area or a few or that don't actually require a transition, these things are easy enough to do in Worldforge, and you will never be able to make a map so perfect with Dragon that you don't have to edit it in Worldforge. The rest of what is in is in groups of up to 5. Mostly your dungeons and what not at 0,10,20,30,40. I've added red and sandstone bricks as well as dark wood. Green marble but it only gets 1 swatch. Grassbump was cut down to 4 swatches but reversed so that it is the higher terrain range is 10,20,30,40. Originally I was going to keep it bigger and have 5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45- however after examining the OSI map in many places they use it it is a difference of 15 Z. Also since I have smoothed the range to powers of 2 and 10 we don't hit 5,15,25,35 with any other terrain groups (mtn doesnt count). Water has also been reduced to the same, I found it's a real problem for statics generation if your water and land don't line up. I had to ditch 1 of the "dungeon" groups, and I'm actually considering dumping a second. Only the brown floorplates have dungeon walls generated for them. If I dumped both groups of grey floorplates I could have them at only 0, plus 3 more terrains at 0 (say dark sandstone fp, light wood, and say flagstone). I know it doesn't seem like much only being able to add a terrain at 1 height, but once it is in it's a lot easier to change height in worldforge than to just make it new. They are also tiles of more limited use. So what does everyone think? I need more feedback. I'd like to turn this mod out this week.

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Ok, I've decided to release it as a beta in the interest of at least getting the new palette and maptrans out (along with the water) so people can get started with their maps. The next mod isn't going to change any of that so there won't be any problems upgrading.

Everything I've got left to do involves better scripts that will still work with a map you make with what I am putting out now; they will just work better. That and some cleaning up. I don't have a sample map in there or a gimp palette. I did make the usual aco,act,pcl. The act is labelled. I haven't done a picture of the table yet either. Anyone who wants to help feel free. Ry's brushes and map actions are still included.

I've found a lot of things in the transition tables that are fucked but fixable. Going to take a bit of time still before I have a master template and then it's just a matter of fixing each script. I still haven't made the wood transitions, right now star, lava and most cave statics between are not in, and I want to revisit the items scripts.

The usual spot, anyone else who wants to feel free to mirror it.
ftp://ldtek.com/UOStuff/dragonmod10.zip

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Arghhhhhh....I'm finding the very lightest shades of the palette are no good.

Ok, I removed the download for now. Sorry people, the palette is too messed up. If you use the last 5 colors on the new ranges it crashes. I guess 16 colors is about it for a gradient with Dragon. On the plus side, it does give us back 45 swatches If we go from a 2 Z increment back to a 3 Z increment it's still decent and we get the same height. Otherwise we are cut down to 30 (Mtns to 75)

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ok, sounds good. when you finished the colortable i would like to translate the labelled table and bmp, if included.

Ok, I'm ready to unveil the new colortable. Tada!

I had to completely reorganize it from what everyone is used to, because it was such a mess trying to just expand on the old one. So now we have 4 row by 5 column sets for the major groups(grass, forest, jungle, sand, snow, dirt, mountain, cave, cobblestone). So the top left is grass 0,2,4,6,8. The second row starts with grass 10,12,14,16,18. Third 20,22,24,26,28. Fourth 30,32,35,37,40 (I had to do some fudging to still make 0-40 with only 20 swatches). Mountain is the exception 2,5,10,15,20-25,30,35,40,45-50,55,60,65,70-75,80,85,90,100. The minor groups (we've got water,dungeon, black, no-draw, sandstone fp, sandstone brick, red brick, dark wood,lava, furrows, and marble) are in single rows(except black and no-draw which are up and down) with 5 colors, 0,10,20,30,40. ). A few extra terrains (ocean,moss, swamp, light wood, dark sandstone fp, green marble, beige marble, silver marble, flagstone, cavewall, stars, blue tile, red tile, brown brick) at only altitude 0 for completeness. Finally we have grassbump 10,20,30,40- until I can figure out a better way to make ridgelines.
I tryed to give the most bang for the buck and the smoothest ranges I could. This of course requires some serious compromises. While there are some things I'm still not positive shouldn't be changed, my reasoning on a lot of it was- Some tiles are used for only small specific areas. Even if you can only generate it at 0 Z, it is much easier to go in with Worldforge and edit those areas than the kind of widespread common terrains. Not to mention many of the manmade tiles do not have transitions associated with them. I don't have time to label this tonight, but I probably will (in English) with the distribution, as well as a labeled colortable for photoshop, and a ms.pal file. Matonor has already offered to do the German version. Any other bilinguals feel free to convert and distribute in your own language, and in fact if you send it to me I will include it in my own. A big thanks goes out to our own Cal, without his help I would still be struggling with color ranges.

Feedback please. While this is more or less the final, I have to majorly edit the transition table yet again, so there is a small time I will consider suggestions, otherwise it has to wait til mod 11 *snicker*.

While I like to make them part of the map, I think a lot of people have their building foundations as statics so floorplates get less use. A lot of people tend to build towns at 0 Z as well, and again, if you don't it is still easier to simply change altitude in Worldforge for tiles that don't require transitions.

I'll have it available for download tomorrow with the new maptrans.txt (I'm releasing some stuff piecemeal before the full release) Other than that I have to finish converting the transitionscripts to the new improved format and I'm going to give getting the water transitions right one last try.

I had a beach group in there (I know Deadworm wanted this) but I realized it was a waste of a swatch. I am including the script and I'll show you how to make it work. Unless you have a map with huge desert areas, usually desert and beach are not adjacent, so it is easy to seperate them and run the different item scripts by coordinates (see my tutorial on that, somewhere in the tutorials forum)

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Gee..I expected a little enthusiasm WAKE UP PEOPLE!

New color table in various forms along with the maptrans.txt and groups.txt to make use of it. When I have the whole mod ready to go I will be including a demo map (I've got something special in mind for that as well) as well as some tutorials hopefully.

A quick and dirty how-to paint coasts for now: Let's say you start with a blank map. Find "Ocean -5" , it's the lovely dark blue you are all used to, swatch#0A. Fill your map with that. Now let's say you want to make your first continent with the lasso tool, define your shape and either make it about 8 tiles bigger than you really want it to begin with, or make it and then expand your selection by 8 pixels. Now fill that in with "Water -5", swatch#0B (somewhat lighter blue). Now contract your selection by 8 pixels and fill that with grass 0 (dark green, top left, swatch#00). So to review you now have an island of green, surrounded by a border of blue, surrounded by even darker blue. When you process this you will get grass 0 surrounded by "OSI bedrock" at -15, surrounded by normal water at -5, because you don't have the new scripts your statics are going to be completely wrong of course, but you can see how the map is going to work at least. All that brown stuff at -15 will be covered with static water tiles.

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I'd be exited but I dunno what to do with that (ie - I can't make maps for shit )

Good job anyways!@

Oh, I guess it would have helped for me to provide the link
the usual ftp://ftp.ldtek.com/UOStuff/Dragon/

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*wets self* now just a little labling on that there color table mmm

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Yeah, I would really love it if someone would do that and send it back to me, I've got a lot to do finishing up the scripts
Among other things I have trouble doing in photoshop, adding text to images gives me fits. Hell, if not for Dragon I would still have no idea whatsoever how to use photoshop. The .aco actually is labelled if you use that. Otherwise all the info is in the maptrans.txt. I'm working on the water statics again and I think I might have something better than the last screenshots I showed, it still isn't perfect. I found a spot where OSI cheats and covers it up, but it comes down to that is 1 of the big flaws with the graphics.

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Ok, I've got something better for the coasts. It still isn't perfect and in fact it requires some care with your technique. On a normal coastline (water statics are at -5) because of the way I had to change all of the transitions to make them better overall, as well as add in the shallow/deep water aspect; South and East coasts must be at 0 Z, period. If you raise them it is going to screw it all up, because while the statics will place properly, the land will cover them up if it is not at just the right altitude. I will try to tinker with it some more to make it a little more tolerant but there isn't much I can do. The SE corner in particular is a bad spot, I had to lower it to make the static visible, which caused the surface terrain to lower (it looks ok, but I don't want to make it go any lower). North and West coasts can be at higher altitude, and in fact look better if you raise them and vary the altitude a bit (gets rid of the blocky look).

You will still be able to have lakes and rivers at 5,15,25, and 35 Z (with land around it at 10,20,30 and 40 respectively). And of course for small areas with special needs you can always static by hand (waterfalls still have to be done by hand as always)

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Actually for the north and west coasts I beleive OSI may have put a 1 pixel - 2 pixel line of land at a lower altitude in order to get rid of that blockiness. You may want to do some experimenting with this theory, but honestly to make it look natural you really should. Land doesn't just come straight forward towards water in most cases and then drop straight. LOL

I've got a couple of theories I might try with the beaches Stormcrow, if I'm ever able to get around to it. That is if you don't mind...

BTW Are you leaving that original blank space at the bottom for customization or are we going to have to cut and choose in order to create new altitudes/tilesets?

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Well I actually have a pretty close approximation of OSI's map. Contrary to popular belief, map2bmp does work. You just need a maptrans.txt written specially for it that includes the transition tiles. It still doesn't work 100%, because specials like grassbump can't really be defined (although I have captured the ridgelines, as well as differentiating between light and dark coast) and of course do to the limits of only 255 tile/height combos. It's pretty close though, mainly I worked on it to test transition tables. It's helped me find some of what I think may get rid of the lava in the 3d client. Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Coastlines. It looks like just varying the height of the grass around the edge is what does the trick.

I wouldn't mind anything you decided to do and share, that's what Dragon mods are all about. Doubly so since you seem to have new and fresh ideas to share. The main reason I do this is because noone has ever handed me a script package that I'm happy with, I have to do it for myself and if I am gonna do that much work, the more people who benefit from it, the more worthwhile it was to do. There's nothing sacred about my scripts; if you rip one of them apart and make it better and send it back to me that's great. If you can come up with a better organization for the color table or better color ranges I'd be happy to implement them too.

Unfortunately I couldn't leave any blank space. I had to cut too much as it is. Ry was mainly getting back blank space from cutting down cobblestones, but I consider them a basic terrain. I really would have liked to have more range on a lot of the small groups I made. Actually I shaved some more space off because I realized cave entrances are nothing more than black and no-draw, so I got rid of it, renamed the cave entrance scripts black2mtn and nodraw2mtn and it works the same. It only saved 2 swatches, but 2 swatches is 2 swatches. I wanted to leave space at the bottom right but because of the way that map2bmp works, FF is the color swatch for anything it doesn't know what to do with, so I wanted to make that a no-draw. The best candidates to get rid of for customizing are probably 2d-2f, 3a-3f,4f,5f. Those are most of the extra 1 terrain at 0 Z, although it may seem somewhat useless to only have 1 Z value, my reasoning was most of them are of very limited use and it is much easier if you only have to edit the Z in WF. This is especially the case with red and blue tile. They are very rare, usually in buildings, definitly going to be a small area, however they do have a transition and if you had to do that in WF it's a pain. I really tryed to get everything I could in. Actually the mandmade tiles in groups of 5 are kinda discretionary. I tryed to keep them for some variety in what I felt were the most commonly used types. The brick especially a lot of people probably won't use, at the same time I had the desire to make them a full 0-40 (in fact 2 of the stone floorplates got cut down to 1 tile each for them) because I think they could be used more.

Now that I think about it, I would actually move the cave group up top and the rest of the stuff to the bottom (to better facilitate customizing), but at this point I don't know how many people have downloaded and started using the new color table already. I would like to keep SOME standardization of it, just so that when people share maps they dont have to include a colortable and maptrans with it (although they are small and maybe that isn't a bad idea either)

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We now have selected scripts available for download as well as the colortable and maptrans. Basicly right now I am putting certain completed scripts in the Dragon directory on my ftp for download. You can see it is starting to look like a normal Dragon directory. Feel free to download and use any of the files but please do not start mirroring them yet. When I have it all ready for distribution I'll pack it up and zip it. Then anyone who would like to mirror it please do so.

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Yup, I built and compiled a map to test it, just dropping the z value towards the coast doesn't get rid of it 100%, but using a combination of that and varying the z value along the coastline does make a very nice coast line.



Well thank you.



Oh, I think your colortable is just fine. But I usually don't do anything without customizing it. Now that I know what I'm doing in dragon, I've started customizing that too. This way it's putting out maps the way I want them designed. But I've developed specific tastes when it comes to my maps. I started out just like anyone on here, building maps according to the tutorials.



Oh, yes, I didn't realize that before. I agree with you, keep the cobblestone in there. I use it alot. It took me a minute to realize what you where saying with the cave entrances... but now I think I get it. If you paint black for your cave entrance, you'll get a black cave. But if you paint nodraw in for your cave entrance, you'll get a clear cave entrance. So in theory there is no need for the cave entrance swatches to be there. Just black and nodraw. Makes sense. But then shouldn't you only need Black 0, 10, 20, 30? and the same for nodraw? The space at the bottom right I think I'll be getting rid of because I don't use map2bmp. So that's at least one free space.



I mainly only have need for the dungeon tile sets. I also don't have a lot of use for anything higher than 30z as far as the normal tiles go. Except for mountain and maybe dirt. So I'll be stripping all those as well. Kinda makes me feel bad, though. I'll be removing alot of your hard work.



That's what I intended to start doing actually. When I start sharing my custom maps I'll be releasing custom colortables and maptrans with them.

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i just finished translating the colortable to german.
http://www.matonor.de/downloads/dragon-mod10ger_byMatonor.aco