Random map : Alpine Mountains

[Feldfeld]

11 minutes ago, badosu said:

I tested it, the mountains and ranges look pretty good!

I found two issues:

- Players can spawn side by side or too close often, you might want to make them avoid with a bigger radius. For this reason, and mountains occupying a big amount of territory i think normal might be the best format atm
- In one occasion the chickens could not be placed for a players, maybe it's an issue with elevation, or additional straggler wood. But I couldn't pinpoint the issue.

Thanks for your feedback. Indeed, making players spawn further away is something I considered. It can also be fun having games when they're close but that makes unbalanced generations more likely to happen I think so yeah i'll put some minimum distance some time in the future.

And yeah, I noticed for the chicken too, I have no idea why it happens

[badosu]

Are you placing anything very close to the cc that might be obstructing?

You can also check if it happens when the elevation is too high or steep.

[DerekO]

I tried installing the Mod. It didn't allow me to play on Multiplayer any help?

[Feldfeld]

1 minute ago, DerekO said:

I tried installing the Mod. It didn't allow me to play on Multiplayer any help?

Yes, that's because I didn't put the workaround from nani which enables that. You can disable the mod if you don't intend to play the map.

3 minutes ago, badosu said:

Are you placing anything very close to the cc that might be obstructing?

Not that I know of (I give a bit more straggler trees as arguments for the base building function, but there is still plenty of place for the chicken)

4 minutes ago, badosu said:

You can also check if it happens when the elevation is too high or steep.

I did put some terrain flattening around CC starting position, the code being taken from the Hellas map IIRC

[badosu]

1 minute ago, Feldfeld said:

Not that I know of (I give a bit more straggler trees as arguments for the base building function, but there is still plenty of place for the chicken)

I would be suspicious of this, the placement algorithm is very @#$%le last time I checked.

(lol fi-ckle is a curse? ffs)

Edited June 23, 2020 by badosu

[Feldfeld]

11 minutes ago, badosu said:

I would be suspicious of this, the placement algorithm is very @#$%le last time I checked.

(lol fi-ckle is a curse? ffs)

I could give a little bit less trees but I still like having a good amount there.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I think we can approximate mountains a lot better. I once advocated for us to make mountain meshes/models (and they could still be done), but after exploring 4096x4096 terrain textures for Alpha 25 I've come to the conclusion that by using extra high resolution textures we can make some very nice mountains indeed:

 

Now, I hand sculpted that mountain in Atlas, but would it be possible to approximate these kinds of realistic mountain shapes in a random map script? If not, perhaps we can use height maps to do so and then the map scripts can render the mountains from those.

Edited July 17, 2020 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[badosu]

One naive idea is to make an elevation map with perlin noise on the area you assign for the mountain then make a linear elevation increase gradient towards the center.

https://hackernoon.com/how-to-make-mountains-memorable-with-perlin-noise-76f93da23601

Edited July 17, 2020 by badosu

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Some kind of procedurally generated mountain system with fractals perhaps (I think that's what that guy did in your article).

What I have noticed is that mountains "branch" out like a fractal does. They are seldom just lumps (AOM's mountains were just big lumps). They actually extrude outward from the heights and form ridges, and more ridges extrude outward from those. 

Edited July 17, 2020 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Sundiata]

@wowgetoffyourcellphone, those look really gorgeous! Quite literally an order of magnitude better than what we have now... 

[FeXoR]

Just to let you know @Feldfeld : I am working on a mountain shape painter and a continuous area placer (to check for player connectivity).

Maybe @smiley has alternative ideas but I guess having multiple ways to do similar things (if different enough) or to pick the "better" of two won't hurt

[Sundiata]

7 hours ago, FeXoR said:

Just to let you know @Feldfeld : I am working on a mountain shape painter and a continuous area placer (to check for player connectivity).

Maybe @smiley has alternative ideas but I guess having multiple ways to do similar things (if different enough) or to pick the "better" of two won't hurt

I think that one of the things that makes wow's mountain demonstration stand out, apart from their structure, is the use of superior textures with excellent normal maps (or height maps, I dunno). I think these textures could be "easily" combined with procedural techniques as well.   

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

6 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

I think that one of the things that makes wow's mountain demonstration stand out, apart from their structure, is the use of superior textures with excellent normal maps (or height maps, I dunno). I think these textures could be "easily" combined with procedural techniques as well.   

Right, it's shape combined with super high res textures and good normal maps. The new "ground" terrains such as dirt, grass, forestfloor, etc. are 2048x2048. In contrast, the new cliff terrains are 4096x4096 diffuse textures with 4096x4096 normal/parallax maps (spec maps I scale down to 2048 or 1024 to save some space). With such large ground textures you can adjust their spread and reduce repeating patterns. With such massive cliff textures you reduce the appearance of stretching and don't have to use the triplanar material that muddies the texture. Also, with such large high quality terrain textures you can use fewer of them and get a more unified look to the biome instead of throwing as many textures as you can in there to get a good look. So, you'd have 15-20 terrains per biome instead of 58 (as per the current Desert folder in EA). 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

At the end of the day, a terrain texture overhaul will have 1/2 the number of terrain textures, but will cost about 2x the disk space (each new terrain is approximately 4x the size of their current counterparts). Still, for a modern game in the year 2020, 0 A.D. will be on the lower side as far as disk space even with terrain overhaul. 

[Feldfeld]

11 hours ago, FeXoR said:

Just to let you know @Feldfeld : I am working on a mountain shape painter and a continuous area placer (to check for player connectivity).

Maybe @smiley has alternative ideas but I guess having multiple ways to do similar things (if different enough) or to pick the "better" of two won't hurt

Nice, I'll consider making a new map when the mountain shape painter is done.

[alre]

Hello, I am trying to mod random maps, and I was wondering how things are going with new mountain painters? I have an idea for generating playable (partially passable) mountains, it's simple and works fine, but maybe you already have more advanced solutions. I for sure would need some directions.

@FeXoR@smiley

[smiley]

On 07/03/2021 at 10:45 PM, alre said:

Hello, I am trying to mod random maps, and I was wondering how things are going with new mountain painters? I have an idea for generating playable (partially passable) mountains, it's simple and works fine, but maybe you already have more advanced solutions. I for sure would need some directions.

@FeXoR@smiley

Since the message was posted, unfortunately, irl took up all time. If you have code, feel free to post for review. I might be able to suggest some things.

[alre]

Well I'm now on two different projects: I made a modded version of the Nile map, that changes the disposition of the players, and I think I will eventually pull-request it as an option that players can choose after picking the map.

That was mostly to get familiar with random map scripting, the map I really want to create is one with mountains that don't play out as simple placeholders for obstructed land, but feel more natural and playable. A different terrain to battle on.

To generate mountains, the idea I had is simple: given a portion of any shape of a raster map, sample a number for each pixel (the sampling distribution can and will affect the result), then make each pixel have elevation equal to the lowest neighbour plus the random value for that pixel. I made a proof of concept in R and these are the results (with different distribution for noise):

Spoiler

Binary 0/1 distribution

Uniform distribution on [0, 1]

Mixed distribution. It makes sense to have something like this, smoother than 0/1 but still high in variance.

I wonder if this simple idea alone can produce good loking mountains, but I need to tweak the distribution first. And to do that, I need to know how the heightmap affects rendering and how it affects passability. I didn't find anything about this.

Also, a painter that makes any impassable terrain evident by applying a rocky texture on it, would be terribly useful, I didn't find that either.

Edited March 10, 2021 by alre

[FeXoR]

Hi @alre o/

You can use setBaseTerrainDiamondSquare to get a realistic heightmap. Currently there is no painter for it though but you can either apply it to the entire map or to an own heightmap you can then manipulate before applying to the g_Map.height.

The SmoothElevationPainter can blend in terrain elevation into the surroundings if you only want parts of the map to be mountainous.

You can use getSlopeMap to see how steep the terrain is to e.g. paint cliff/rock texture.
There is no way to determine what parts exactly can be traveled by which unit for the components that handle that are not running during map generation.