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Topic: is there any plan for creating impassable cliffs?

king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-10-15, 09:11

i seem to remember someone was working on them, but can't find the topic.

I was thinking on making a map of the Dolomites mountains (more or less to scale with the real mountains, with players starrting in the positions of real towns), but it would lack something without real cliffs, with the game encouraging to make roads up the mountains instead of following the valleys


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2015-10-15, 09:25

The way to go here would be to strongly discourage or disallow roads that are very steep - we would need to define what this means exactly though.

I think somebody was working on mountaintops as an "immovable" - that approach wouldn't need any engine changes.

Edited: 2015-10-15, 09:25

Busy indexing nil values

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QCS

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Posted at: 2015-10-15, 10:03

Another way would be making the map huge enough to make the mountains big enough (area) so that two maximum-area military buildings on the opposite of the "mountain top" can not join their influence areas so you can not pass directly.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-10-15, 12:39

yeah, it was more of a stylistic choice, both to reproduce some of the more vertical cliffs, like the lagazuoi (https://www.google.fi/search?q=funivia+lagazuoi&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CCYQsARqFQoTCJyXnp6hxMgCFUbXLAod4LAA1g&biw=1600&bih=736#imgrc=SegjuV3dH9YpWM%3A), and to force the players to make zigzagging roads, like real mountain roads.

I would like the possibility of making a difference in elevation of 6 steps between two adjacent corners (right now the limit is 5), with the catch that roads cannot be built on a slope of 6, and workers cannot climb it. that would still allow moving horizontally along the slope, and climbing it by taking detours, just like a real mountain road.

But I realize that it would require adding a lot of code, so it will likely remain a fond dream.

My hope would be to make a mostly to-scale 256x256 map of the area between Arabba, Cortina d'Ampezzo, and Alleghe, with a scale of 1 step for 200 meters of real distance and only some minor tweaking to make it playable and balanced; most real mountains are not so large that it would stop a couple of towers in the valleys from controlling the top, but i can use snow and immovable rocks to make it impassable. anyway, that's very ambitious and i have no idea if i will manage to go through with it.

EDIT: also, i see that some of the "debris" immovable are impassable, but unobtrusive enough that they can easily fit with a scenario of barren rocks so that i can cover a mountain with it without it looking bad

Edited: 2015-10-15, 12:51

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einstein13
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Posted at: 2015-10-15, 13:47

elevation of 6 steps shouldn't be possible for "normal" mountain making. Why? Just because most of map makers will not want to create them as default. I would make it as additional tab/ tool for terrain creation called "create cliffs". Then all lines matched as 'try to make cliff here' will change to slope = 6 if possible (and we can add different look for that terrain slope). That is in general my idea for this tool.

The algorithm can be very easy to do, but it will cause some problems if we want to make cliffs in 2 dimensions (for example 10 units long and 2 units wide). But for basic cliffs it can be easily implemented.


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2015-10-15, 17:27

I was working on some kind of a cliff. See here, but his could only be used horizontal. Here you could find an image of other cliff-like terrains which do not have such a limitation.

Examples for hilltops could found here. This ones are immovables, just the same as stones, ruins or plants. I didn't worked further on this because i believe they should have a shadow like the other immovables and this should best be done with blender (which i couldn't work with; too many buttons face-grin.png )


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einstein13
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Posted at: 2015-10-16, 10:24

I remember old Age Of Empires II game. Now it is renewed for HD and some images are renewed too. Cliffs there are made quite good. For example here. I guess that it is solved as immovable. If you want to create cliffs, you are setting some immovable. The only problem is links: if you want to make crossroad with cliffs, AOE2 is making mess. Also the second problem is that we have 6 directions. I think that if we will do some cliffs to Widelands, it will cause lots of bugs... So my vote is to make is just after some stable build (18.5 or 19?)


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-10-16, 15:03

i started making the map, and i'm actually running into the opposite problem: the real mountains are not steep enough.

I set 1 unit of elevation equal to 50 meters, because I need to reproduce terrain going from 500 to 3500 meters of altitude in the 0-60 scale the game allows. I also set 1 step as roughly 100 meters, to reproduce the area i wanted in a 250x250 map. But as a result of this scale, even slopes that are very hard in the real world turn out to be gentle in the game. also, the scale reproduction smooths out most of the terrain asperity: I reproduced a real mountaintop as faithfully as possible (converting coordinates and altitudes from google maps), and farms can be built on top of it; it doesn't even look like a mountain, more of a gentle hill.

And obvious possibility would be to increase the horizontal scale of the map; if i take one step as 200 meters, the slopes would be twice as steep. however, the valleys where i want the players to settle would become too small. Or i could give up on making the map to scale, but then there would be not much point to it as it wold be no different from the dozens of mountain maps already available. it should be possible to have a good result by keeping the overall shape of mountains and valleys while lliberally changing the scale to make it look good, but it's hard to do and I doubt I can get a satisfying result that way.

Anyway, that has nothing to do with the fact that it would be cool to have the chance to make a canyon with impassable walls or stuff like that.


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2015-10-16, 16:05

Anyway, that has nothing to do with the fact that it would be cool to have the chance to make a canyon with impassable walls or stuff like that.

Yes i would like have this feature too. I am always thinking about something like in RCT (Roller coaster tycoon). In the editor of RCT you could lift an edge independent form the adjacent edges. All areas (also vertical ones) could then be attached with a pattern. Thus you could build very steep mountains. An example from an earlier version of rct. My brother plays this game a lot... he send me this example from RCT3:

rct3

I don't know how this could be implemented face-sad.png


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2015-10-16, 16:52

Something like serpentine with hilltops:

serpentine.jpg


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