Terrain Overview and Evaluation

[Eleazar]

I think before we add a bunch of new terrains, we should take stock of what works well, and what is lacking, and try to plan for things to be easily expandable.

Obviously there's a lot to be proud of.

• But i think the biggest problem is with transitions. Some of them needlessly take up too much space from adjacent hexes. Notice that the hex of water is often more than half filled with other terrain. Larger units straddle these choked waters. The same kind of thing happens between other terrains. A single hex of a "lower" terrain sometimes is only visible in 1/3rd of it's hex. Some terrain, like the castles have good reason to spill over, but other's like the deserts don't.

• Some of these terrains also exhibit unnaturally straight edges. It would make sense in something like a paved road, but not in a natural geography. Besides, this is a freaking hex-based game. If any arbitrary geometry shows through it should be hexagons, not squares. These straight edges cause some of the excessive encroachment into neighboring hexes.

• I know we've looked into it in the past, but i think we could do something more uniform for land<->water transitions. The grassland & savannah transitions to water are essentially the normal transition overlaid on the sand transition by hand. It would seem much more efficient if the terrain engine layered both of these for a more consistent (and easier to maintain) edge. The majority of terrains should be able to transition to water with a handful of land<-> water transitions types.


I'd like to keep this topic at a more general, abstract level — focusing on the big picture. Concrete details of implementation should only be included to keep the big picture connected to reality.

I have some other points about transitions, but i need to do a bit of testing first.

[Boucman]

eleazar, you should edit the test-scenario and commit it with the map you have above, it would help testing different terrains...

[Eleazar]

eleazar, you should edit the test-scenario and commit it with the map you have above, it would help testing different terrains...

scenario-test.cfg has some scripting in it, but it won't, i can't figure out how to play it, nor will the map editor load it.

[Jetrel]

Notable terrains that I don't like in the current set:
• sand
• desert sand
• desert hills
• desert mountains
• dirt (especially the transitions)


Notable transitions I don't like in the current set:
• snow transitions with grass/land (freim seems to be working on a promising snow-water transition)
• dirt (ugly with just about everything)
• sand transitions with water. It's currently pretty good with grass, but it's bad, IMO, with water.


And that's about it, actually. There were more, but some beautiful work on mog/pekka/eleazar's part has eliminated the problems with chasm, lava, and swamp (which look terrific, right now).

[Boucman]

to run the test scenario, start wesnoth with the "-t " argument

I am suprised the cfg doesn't cleanly load in the editor...

[mog]

I agree with Eleazar that some of the transitions overlap too much of the terrain. Major offenders seem to be desert and sand, as they could be easily reduced by several pixels without losing any details.
Hills and mountains are also quite big, but I'm not sure if that can be avoided.

The straight edges are quite obvious at the desert/water transition, but all in all it doesn't seem to be a problem. Some amount of smoothing is IMHO neccessary. Especially rivers looks just strange when the hex shape is too clearly visible.

Jetryl is mostly right with his list, though I don't see anything wrong with the sand and dirt (except its transitions, of course). OTOH, I hate the desert road terrain. It's ugly, the transitions are ugly and I don't see anything "desert roady" in it.

[Eleazar]

I modified the normal hill transitions to take up less space, and blend more with the terrain at the base.

Can someone explain how multi-sided transitions are chosen? In some cases i can't get particular transitions to show up. I added 2 3-sided trans for the hills and i can't get the map editor to display them. I have a nagging suspicion that many of the multi-sided transitions never show up.


Another thing i should point out is the dwarven castle is many pixels lower than the normal castles. That's why it looks bad with the embankment to water than normal castles use.

[Eleazar]

Other thoughts.

• Since the mountains are designed to blend seamlessly with their associated hill type, it makes sense to me to use the actual hill transitions for mountains. (Mountains generally have foothills anyway.) So to add new desert or snow mountains no new transitions would need to be made, the desert/snow hill transitions could be used. If these hill have a special transition to water it could be used for the mountains without any extra work. Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

• Also notice in my first post, how the connection between savanah and grassland is "pinched off." But notice that the connection between forest and hill is not. That's because forest and hill use the same land—water transition. If a land—water transition was used for a large number of compatible terrains, these weird indentation would seldom occur.

• The screenshot show the less-encroaching hill and cobbled road (which still needs work) trans. Of course the hill takes up nearly the same amount of water, because the "beach" part hasn't been changed.

• i think the cave would look better if it had a trans much more like the cobbled road.

[freim]

Other thoughts.

• Since the mountains are designed to blend seamlessly with their associated hill type, it makes sense to me to use the actual hill transitions for mountains. (Mountains generally have foothills anyway.) So to add new desert or snow mountains no new transitions would need to be made, the desert/snow hill transitions could be used. If these hill have a special transition to water it could be used for the mountains without any extra work. Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

Sounds like a good idea. It was a pain in the ass to make everything fit together when I worked on these. If we can consilidate them more it would be good. Should be doable in WML.

Edit: Since I missed you on IRC, I can write my response here. What I would like to see is a move towards more "defined" transitions, the new ice transition is a perfect example of this. It's somewhat exagerated in scale, but I'm not very concerned about that. If I was to point out the best transition we have atm I would vote for the ice transition. It looks very good, and it's very clear what it is.

So in addition to trying to consolidate the transitions I would like more "defined" transitions where this makes sense, instead of the often somewhat bland and non-distinct faded transitions we have now. These more defined trans can also more easily be made to use less space I believe.

btw, the snow transition should be removed and use the ice trans with a smaller snow trans on top. I did start on this some time ago, I'll dig it up again.

[mog]

Other thoughts.

• Since the mountains are designed to blend seamlessly with their associated hill type, it makes sense to me to use the actual hill transitions for mountains. (Mountains generally have foothills anyway.) So to add new desert or snow mountains no new transitions would need to be made, the desert/snow hill transitions could be used. If these hill have a special transition to water it could be used for the mountains without any extra work. Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

Sounds like a good idea. It was a pain in the ass to make everything fit together when I worked on these. If we can consilidate them more it would be good. Should be doable in WML.

Indeed:

This is using the normal hills graphics. It needs some adjustments to smooth out the transition but looks good otherwise.

btw, the snow transition should be removed and use the ice trans with a smaller snow trans on top. I did start on this some time ago, I'll dig it up again.

I disagree for the same reasons I didn't use the current ice transition on top of land: It looks completely unnatural, like a glacier. It would be even more out of place for snow.

[freim]

btw, the snow transition should be removed and use the ice trans with a smaller snow trans on top. I did start on this some time ago, I'll dig it up again.

I disagree for the same reasons I didn't use the current ice transition on top of land: It looks completely unnatural, like a glacier. It would be even more out of place for snow.

I meant to replace the current snow to water trans, not the land trans. I don't see whats supposed to be so unatural about it, are you saying glaciers are artificial?

[mog]

I disagree for the same reasons I didn't use the current ice transition on top of land: It looks completely unnatural, like a glacier. It would be even more out of place for snow.

I meant to replace the current snow to water trans, not the land trans. I don't see whats supposed to be so unatural about it, are you saying glaciers are artificial?

Oops, I misunderstood. But I'm still not sure if it'looks good. We'll have to try it I guess.

And while a glacier itself is certainly natural, a glacier coming out of a river/lake it probably not

[zookeeper]

And while a glacier itself is certainly natural, a glacier coming out of a river/lake it probably not

Sounds like a good place to have two variations of the terrain, one with a "flat" transition to land and one with a higher "glacier" transition.

[freim]

Oops, I misunderstood. But I'm still not sure if it'looks good. We'll have to try it I guess.

And while a glacier itself is certainly natural, a glacier coming out of a river/lake it probably not

Yeah, I can see that. However I think what we gain by using somewhat exaggerated features on transitions will outweight the realism problems. For instance the ice transition has by being slightly more pronounced gained a lot in depth and perspective which at least for me makes it look much better. The scale in Wesnoth is kind of wack anyway and trying to much to reduce this problem at the expense of other qualities is a bit unfortunate imo.

[Eleazar]

Edit: Since I missed you on IRC, I can write my response here. What I would like to see is a move towards more "defined" transitions, the new ice transition is a perfect example of this. It's somewhat exagerated in scale, but I'm not very concerned about that. If I was to point out the best transition we have atm I would vote for the ice transition. It looks very good, and it's very clear what it is.

So in addition to trying to consolidate the transitions I would like more "defined" transitions where this makes sense, instead of the often somewhat bland and non-distinct faded transitions we have now. These more defined trans can also more easily be made to use less space I believe.

Yeah, i think something along the lines of the ice trans would make a great generic land—water transition, which could be placed under that terrain's normal trans. it wouldn't work for everything, but should be do-able for many terrains.

I agree currently the faded transition is overused, but it works well in some situations. I added more transparency to the down-hill parts of the hill trans, and i think that's part of what makes it look better. I also added more transparency to the cobbled road. I believe it looks a lot more convincing, the semi-transparent stones, since they retain their shape and definition seem to be just under the surface of the water, or half-covered with dust, or sand.

The point is while a smooth transparency gradient will usually look artificial, a granular transparency that follows the form of the terrain is much more effective.