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Topic: wouldn't it be nice to have a minable tree-friendly terrain?

GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2015-11-28, 15:17

I have updated the branch - you can now add custom tooltips to terrains. It is a list, so you can add as many entries as you want for each terrain.

It's also completely optional, so you don't need to add empty lists to the terrains where you don't want them.

Edited: 2015-11-28, 15:17

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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2015-11-28, 17:23

Nice... now we have a tooltip saying "Mountain: mountainous treeless and like trees" for forested mountain face-grin.png ("like trees" is my change to the tooltip-list of the updated branch)

We could just remove this "treeless" (aka "kDry") form the tooltip by removing the related code only in src/editor/ui_menus/editor_tool_set_terrain_options_menu.cc, but i think this wouldn't be a good solution.

Having the possibility for additional tooltips is a nice idea though. We could use this for placing an image of a tree on the terrain in the editor like we have for "arable", "mountain", "water" and so on.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-11-28, 22:52

i tried to save or export that excel table as an image or pdf or anything, but it doesn't work. it insists in splitting the table into several pages so that what should be on the right goes down instead. So i need someone's help with that. it's very big anyway. einstein did a good job of compressing the tree growth table to a couple pages easily read, but i cannot.

by the way, since you're going to rename a few stuff in the editor, can you change the various meadow and hard ground and tundra to meadow 1, 2, 3, 4? i'd prefer to have something to distinguish them in the name.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2015-11-28, 23:02

Sounds like exporting the Excel is a bit tricky. Unless you have used colours to mark up stuff, you could export it as a .cvs file (universally readable) and give it to Einstein to upload on his homepage?

We can't just remove "treeless" from the tooltips, because then terrains that are only kDry like Beach won't show any properties at all. How about calling it "not arable" or "meager"?

Edited: 2015-11-28, 23:03

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2015-11-28, 23:05

king_of_nowhere wrote:

by the way, since you're going to rename a few stuff in the editor, can you change the various meadow and hard ground and tundra to meadow 1, 2, 3, 4? i'd prefer to have something to distinguish them in the name.

This was inconsistent in the past and we ended up removing it, because people were of the opinion that is wasn't needed. I would be willing to add it back in though if we get more people that want it. I would just like to prevent a back-and-forth on this, because it will break translations each time.


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2015-11-29, 11:14

king_of_nowhere: you could upload the excel sheet on luanchpad to the bug. On the right you will find a box "called Bug Attachments" and on the end of the list a link to upload something. I, or einstein, could then try to convert the file.

Because of numbering the terrains, it was my suggestion to remove the numbers.... In the past i found them not very helpful.

GunChleoc wrote:

We can't just remove "treeless" from the tooltips, because then terrains that are only kDry like Beach won't show any properties at all.

If we call it "walkable" this property could be shown with a flag. Beach is walkable, so a flag is a good way to show this face-wink.png

test.png

How about calling it "not arable" or "meager"?

Then we have "Mountain: mountainous and meager/not arable" or "Water: aquatic, impassable and meager/not arable"

"not arable" will work for water but not for mountains. "meager" wouldn't work for both forested mountains and water.

And beside: Why is beach "treeless" while barren steppe isn't shown as "treeless"? Both have the same probability of growing trees. No, the only thing that works is to have kDry as "walkable" and removing kDry from all terrains which also are "impassable". All other solutions would be a workaround imho.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2015-11-29, 12:09

Because of numbering the terrains, it was my suggestion to remove the numbers.... In the past i found them not very helpful.

GunChleoc wrote:

We can't just remove "treeless" from the tooltips, because then terrains that are only kDry like Beach won't show any properties at all.

If we call it "walkable" this property could be shown with a flag. Beach is walkable, so a flag is a good way to show this face-wink.png

How about calling it "not arable" or "meager"?

Then we have "Mountain: mountainous and meager/not arable" or "Water: aquatic, impassable and meager/not arable"

"not arable" will work for water but not for mountains. "meager" wouldn't work for both forested mountains and water.

If we use "walkable", then we end up with "walkable" ocean, and ocean is not walkable - this would be worse than "meager" or "not arable".

And beside: Why is beach "treeless" while barren steppe isn't shown as "treeless"? Both have the same probability of growing trees. No, the only thing that works is to have kDry as "walkable" and removing kDry from all terrains which also are "impassable". All other solutions would be a workaround imho.

I will have to look at the movecaps/buildcaps code to see if that is feasible without breaking anything - if so, we could indeed call it "walkable".

Edited: 2015-11-29, 12:09

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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-11-29, 16:54

kaputtnik wrote:

king_of_nowhere: you could upload the excel sheet on luanchpad to the bug. On the right you will find a box "called Bug Attachments" and on the end of the list a link to upload something. I, or einstein, could then try to convert the file.

ok, done.

Re: the numbers

If the majority of people decided to remove them, never mind. I assumed they had always been that way.

Re: the tags

I think there should be two tags, one for the specific trait, one for trees. The first can be arable (can make buildings on it), mountainous/minable (can make mines on it), walkable (can make roads, not buildings, on it), water, dead (cannot make roads on it, but can on its border; only swamp has that), impassable (cannot touch it).

Only one of those tags apply, and only one is needed. I assume it's intuitive enough that if a terrain is arable, it is automatically also walkable, or that you cannot make roads on a water terrain.

As for trees, three tags should suffice: barren, scantily forested, forested. for icon, a flat ground, a small tree and a big tree should work, or mayeb a flat ground, a tree, and several trees. So the tags should be as simple as "minable, forested". Also, the forested tag should not apply to water, dead and impassable terrain; i trust one can figure out that trees don't grow on water or lava.


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wl-zocker

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Posted at: 2015-11-29, 21:13

The first can be arable (can make buildings on it), mountainous/minable (can make mines on it), walkable (can make roads, not buildings, on it), water, dead (cannot make roads on it, but can on its border; only swamp has that), impassable (cannot touch it).

So the only difference between water and dead would be that ships can pass the former, but not the latter?

Also, I would like to see the terms dead and impassable switched. For me, a swamp is impassable, but not deadly; whereas lava kills you quite surely.

Only one of those tags apply, and only one is needed. I assume it's intuitive enough that if a terrain is arable, it is automatically also walkable, or that you cannot make roads on a water terrain.

What about shallow water where both ships can pass and flags (better: only roads, no flags - but that's more complicated) can be built? We would need a new icon for this combination. Or do you want to indicate passability for ships with a third icon? Then, water and whatever be take for swamp could use the same first icon.


"Only few people know how much one has to know in order to know how little one knows." - Werner Heisenberg

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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-11-29, 21:26

well, yes, the only difference between water and swamp actually is that boats go on water, if you think about it. and that you get fish in water. aside from that, those two terrains behave the same way. if you think in the future we'll want to make terrains that are both walkable and navigable, then "navigable" as a tag could be added. so water would be "water, navigable".

as for the distinction between dead and impassable, i also could find more intuitive the way you suggest, but the current version is more accurate. consider: uf you make a thin strip of swamp, you can walk over it, even make roads over it. you can't build over it, so the terrain is dead in that sense. while you cannot step on lava in any way, so lava is impassable.


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