Nazgel wrote:
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.
Actually because the cave entrances will always need to be fixed by hand (it is impossible for Dragon to do the transition properly, which is why we go 3 wide instead of only 2). To do a cave transition properly would require ABC type transitions which Dragon simply can't do. Plus you want to have static cave tiles placed at the level of the surrouding C terrain (say dirt) so you can walk in. The main reason that black and no-draw were left at 0-40 instead of just 0 are because when you have a dungeon area at 40, you want the black around it at 40 as well. The no-draw as I'm sure you know is useful for cutting openings. However again with more thought (prompted by this discussion) looking back I really would just cut them down to 0 and make another group bigger (like the light and medium floorplates) because of my general directive #1, which is; the smaller the area it is used and the easier it is to edit by worldforge, the more likely a candidate it is to get cut from the table. I also really would have just gone with 0-30, 2 increments for most terrain for myself; I thought everyone else wanted more.
At this point in time though I am not going to go back and make any more changes to the colortable or the mod 10 maptrans. I don't know how many people have started using it already, but there has been considerable traffic on my ftp since I put it up.
Right now I am going to concentrate on finishing the mod. Mainly what needs to be fixed are the transition tables anyway (besides I need them done for another project), really the maptrans editing is simple enough for everyone to season to taste.
I think just to get as a new standard for people to include the color table and maptrans (probably groups.txt and some support scripts as well) when they share bmps would really solve a lot of problems. This way the map you get is the map the creator intended, yet no-ones creativity is stifled because they have to work with someone elses choices.
For the future I am going to probably do some more colortables. This whole discussion has given me an idea for a cave and dungeons mod, which would involve advanced techniques such as using different mods for different parts of your map and patching them together (the Dian method), and of course Ry's cavebuilding technique. A colortable designed for making a cave entrance possibly tile by tile instead of transitionaly, so there would be no worldforging, more support for designing things like Mount Kendall (lot's of cliffs and dirt paths through the mountains), more lava, and of course bigger ranges for the cave and dungeon tiles which are small in the normal mod. Probably some grassbump type groups to do waterfalls and lavafalls.