Another Dumb Sugestion, By Spyro_Drag

[Spyro_Drag]

ok, so i love Warzone, but the latest versions have been using a new terrain... Something or other... it makes some maps look very nice, very realistic, meshing the grass with the mud, and giving the water a better wave, even curving the slopes removing the "boxy" shape. But with a Few of my latest maps, for instance Crazy_Roads_L, it causes my roads and sidewalks to look... weird, the streats are suppes to be 2 lane and 3 lane, but this new thing makes it 1, and 2.

so heres my dumb suggestion, add the option. the in game option, to turn this off and use the original generator. make it so things dont blend, so the gass dosent overgrow the sidewalks, so the steets look like clean crisp streets. i really hope im not making my self look bad, but this new generator just doesnt work with my maps, and im not skilled enough to add my own tilesets to my maps just yet, so i would LOVE this option.

Thank you for leting me Vent.

[NoQ]

The situation with custom textures is as follows. You can still use custom textures, one of your choices may be to pack tileset/*decals.txt inside your map to turn all tiles into decals. As long as most of the original tiles are still present in the base game, you can then pack only the few that have actually been changed and get your old renderer for every map without too much filesize increase.

It is also possible to make a standalone mod that makes the game fall back to the old terrain (without decreasing the hardware requirements, of course), i can have a look.

the streats are suppes to be 2 lane and 3 lane, but this new thing makes it 1, and 2.

Could you check how this looks with this patch? It changes quite a lot of things, one of them is making map vertex color voting completely isotropic (independent of direction). If this patch is ever accepted, i believe this particular off-by-one issue will be gone: even though tiles will still be smoothed, they will be smoothed equally in all directions, so it will look more or less as intended at the end.

[Spyro_Drag]

Thank you i will try this, but i still think they should have some sort of option to toggle standard and advanced terrain on or off, this would probubly fall under the "quality", or rather it would be a setting that would help people with older systems like myself. im not done with the tileset i was working on, (it may take awhile), but ill give that and this "patch" a try, is there a specific version it is supposed to workl with?

[NoQ]

The patch should work on both 3.1betas and current master. If you don't know how to apply a patch, i can post some screenshots for you to compare later. Or maybe you point me to a map and a specific location on it and post how it looks in 3.1 beta11, and post a screenshot of the same place with the patch applied, and you say if you like it.

this would probubly fall under the "quality", or rather it would be a setting that would help people with older systems like myself.

The modding method i proposed above has no influence on video performance, so it won't really help people with older systems.

There is one more reason why i don't like the idea of adding support for old renderer into the base game, even configurable: because this heavily decreases the capabilities of map making. With old renderer, many maps designed with the new renderer in mind will look not just bad but ugly. And nobody will make a map that will look that much ugly depending on the client's video options. So all the benefits of the new renderer for map making will disappear if we decide to continue/keep support for the old renderer.

[NoQ]

Ok here is an example. The screenshot below was made on 3.1 beta11:

wz2100-20120803_104506-Crazy_Roads_L_1-T1.jpg

It illustrates the anisotropic terrain bug: even though your road is painted symmetrically, its right side looks wrong (due to concrete line being shifted one tile to the right), while its left side looks more or less correct; the top side is fine but the bottom side is incorrect in a similar way.

With the patch applied, it looks like this:

wz2100-20120803_105152-Crazy_Roads_L_1-T1.jpg

Now the roads are symmetric, but we encounter another problem: lines of grass have completely disappeared, because grass ground type has lower priority than concrete or dark concrete ground types (and there is no map vertex in this realm that has grass on more than half of its adjacent tiles). Note that you cannot achieve correct grass lines on this screenshot by adjusting the map: to do that you need to double the width of the grass line, but you will run into high-priority concrete on one side (something you can't shift as long as you want it look like a concrete ramp) and road surface marking decals (that force dark concrete below them) on the other side.

Now, what you are actually looking for is probably something like that:

wz2100-20120803_110057-Crazy_Roads_L_1-T1.jpg

On this screenshot i (together with applying the patch) lowered the priority of dark concrete (by putting it lower in urban_enum.txt), so grass tiles now manage to acquire some space from them.

But ground type priorities need to be specified globally once and for all for the new renderer (adjustable by map-modding, of course, but you don't seem to like this idea). If we give dark concrete the lowest priority, it may probably disappear from many maps completely (because dark concrete areas are usually very small). On the other hand, they are usually surrounded by decal borders, so they will still remain an eye-candy, so probably it's fine. Note that ground type priorities are introduced by the patch, there is no such thing yet in 3.1 beta11 or master.
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In my opinion, we should get something close to the third variant at the end: after applying the patch, there needs to be some attention given to ground type priorities. I believe that isotropic conversion of old map terrain for the new rendering method makes map making much easier. We still miss some transitions, but at least we are able to make exactly tuned maps for the new renderer without ugly off-by-one hacks. Final solution of these problems require the new map format (completely separate decals from underlying terrain, paint vertices rather than tiles, etc.)

Note: i completely avoided staying on topic in this post (:

[Andrie]

I never recognized the differences, it looks so different

[Spyro_Drag]

(adjustable by map-modding, of course, but you don't seem to like this idea)

its not that i dont like the idea, if i was skilled enough to do so, i would just add my own tileset with its own parameters. But im still learning how to do that, alos im still working on making my own, (which is turning out to be difficult, mostly because i keep geting "Creation Block"), but with the patch, it does look must more like i want it to, but what i really want is for it to look like what the Flame map maker shows it to be, although a few of my maps do benifit form the newer renderer, there are the select few that just dont look any good with it. they would look much better with the older one. gimmi a little while and ill give you a screen shot of what i mean.


But ill settle with the patch till i can master my tileset. im supprised they havent implemented your patch, or at least built it into the game its self, it fixes the terrain misalignment so well, and my street actualy looks like a street in those photos. did you make it?

[Spyro_Drag]

This is what i want

Shot one.PNG

ther streets have Defigned Edges, and so do the side walks, the large streets traffic lines are Bright and very visible, and the grass isnt overgrowing any thing important to the visual, it also dosnt make the "cross walks" over step its position on the street.

im not sure im describing this right, im so sorry if ive confused anything in here.

[NoQ]

im supprised they havent implemented your patch, or at least built it into the game its self, it fixes the terrain misalignment so well

I guess they just never had time to have a closer look at it yet (#3608), so i'm just waiting.

Ok, here is my counter-proposal.

I'm proposing two extensions to the current map format. It opens up certain features that were already once thought of as part of the new map format discussion, but seem easier to implement, as far as i know the map loading/saving code; i may try to do them myself, but i need to have some decision on the patch mentioned above first , cause i'll run into conflicts otherwise.

1. Legalize custom decals.

• Where "legalize" stands for "allow making use of them without requiring map-mods. To do that, allow using a per-map physfs folder (eg. /multiplay/maps/<mapname>/decals/) to store custom decals in a format similar to tertilesc*hw folders in /texpages/, and force all tiles that have a texture in this folder to be automatically treated as decals.
  
  This feature can be made use of on the FlaME side by adding a per-tile "force exact looks (3.2+ only)" checkbox on the texture tab. When checked, FlaME will take textures from its tileset data folder and pack them into the decals folder of the map.
  
  This handles the issue Spyro_Drag mentions in the last post. But this will also allow using better decals without forcing the whole game use the old renderer. Something like this or this then becomes real as a pure unmodded map.

2. Allow overriding color voting.

• Allow the map to contain a per-map PNG file with ground type of each map vertex, coded in a way similar to the one described in the new map format page, or probably in some other way. If present, this file should control all vertex colors, overriding the results of ground type voting based on tile numbers and tile angle ground types.
  
  This feature will finally allow FlaME to be 3.1-ready. Right now there seems to be no way for FlaME to produce arbitrary 3.1 terrain, as shown above: no matter whether the patch is applied or not, some transitions will still be impossible to implement within the old map format due to limitations of the voting procedure.
  
  This also allows painting decals without forcing ground types below them.

[Iluvalar]

This is what i want

Oh my god ! There is walkway .

[Spyro_Drag]

Alright, i do like option one, nice examples btw, i suppose if both flame and the 3.2 were done this way, a great many people would use it. i wonder where i can go to make this suggestion?

P.S. Iluvalar: Yes there is supposed to be a crosswalk at all intersections, as well as ally ways, and sidewalks. the only exception is around the base's ther is no crosswalk because that street is not ment to be walked around, too dangorus for the pedestrians as that is a military base, or rathers if there was any pedestrions. i plan to spit out a newer version of that map with better loking buildings, but i dont have ther training for that yet.

[NoQ]

Here is a patch for master that implements #2 (turned out to be simplier, i'll now work on #1 as well, cause they don't conflict), and a proof-of-concept map that makes use of this patch. See also.

Note: I'm using something else instead of PNG, and i don't insist on that (:

Note: Since the current code relies on ground types to figure out water and cliff borders, it may look weird when such ground types get overriden (the map editor should not do that). But with the extended tilesets patch mentioned above, this issue disappears. Also note that these two patches are independent.

[Spyro_Drag]

sweet ill cheack them out, thanks man.


i know this may sound stupid... But how do i impliment this patch ?!? i feel so... (BANG HEAD ON WALL)

[NoQ]

After a little talk on IRC, we sort of agreed that it's better to complete the new format support than to patch up the old one, so i'd try focusing on that if i can, having the nice talk of this thread in mind of course.

But how do i impliment this patch

Code: Select all

$ patch -p1 -i /path/to/patch/file.patch

in the wz source code directory.

[Spyro_Drag]

ok, been a while since i check this one.

im not sure i under stand that code. im sorry NoQ, im not a coder, and im not as good with software, as i am with my hardware. you might have to explain it better. cause i can be... -_-... dumb?, when it comes to thing like this. now if it were a self instaling .EXE then i woldnt be so demanding for information. im so sorry. :/