Topic: Is it "winterworld" or "arctic world" ?

I am still occupied with the editor UI, and how it could be made fit
for all kinds of additions that might be coming in the future. Not that I could actually do any programming, but Sirver is at it,
and he might welcome some additional suggestions.
I was thinking about what species of animals would be nice to have
and how to sort them for the critter picklist, and how they suit into the worlds, when I realised an inconsistancy:

We have

Greenland

Greenland is clearly a land with moderate temperature, moderate to high precipitation (I guess ) and fertile soil. Central Europe could have been the model.
Clearly it is a climate zone and defined geographically.

Desert

Desert is an arid world with high temperatures. There is currently not enough wildlife there to really tell,
whether "Northern Africa" or" Central Australia" is a better candidate for a model.
Obviously, it would be nice to know, if dromedaries or kangaroos should be populating the Desert world, or Camels, maybe?
In any case it is also a climate zone and so geographic.

Winterland

As the name implies, it's not a geographical or climate zone, but a season of the year.
So I am asking: Are we going for "Greenland (ours!) in Winter", or rather "Greenland" (the RL one) as it really is?
Well, not really Antartica-type, for lack of trees, - but the terrain types are called "taiga" and "tundra" and that points again more to a subarctic geographic region than to a season.
Making this an arctic world with walruses and polar bears would be more in line with the other two worlds, but should find a graphical equivalent in the choice of trees and animals.
Sooner or later we need a decision on that.

Blackworld

I like that one very much, although it still is a bit empty.
It seems to be designed as fantasy world, less realistic than the others with room for trolls, elves, unicorns, dvarves and orcs.
Just look at the phantastic (both meanings ) trees there! But even if that is so, do we really want to make Mordor out of it?
Do we need that kind of muddy, stinking water there? I for one, would rather choose Lanzarote as model than Mordor!

Tropical djungle anyone?

Yep, that's missing. Some sort of tropical environment. Hot and damp with abundent life forms everywhere.
Might be nice.

It is not a purely graphical topic, so I did not want to place it in the graphic forum.
Among other things, we need the programmers' expertise to tell us, whether we will not kill Widelands, with some more scores of critters and a hundrets of animation pictures.
(I found out lately that my machine gave up on a 512x512 map, 8 economies after 12 hours gametime for hunger of RAM; 3GB was not enough).

But most of all it is a choice for those that love the game and play it regularily - much depends on personal taste here.

And finally this is also a call for help. We need more contributions from artist to fill the worlds that we have ... not to mention new ones.
I have never considered myself an artist, and still don't, but I have found out lately that with some effort, even I could contribute a little.
So, if any of you out there, can lend a hand, .. please do.

For now, let us start with your opinions on the how our different worlds should evolve.
I am eager to get your views!

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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It would also be nice for the different world types (greenland, winterland, etc.) to be combined. So that in a defined part of the map (e.g. the northern part) I could use winterland while using the desert in another part (e.g. the south) and greenland inbetween.

For the landscape objects (immovables and animals), this should be no problem - but maybe for the terrain?

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I (at least) have thought about Winterland as an area in the middle of winter, instead of an arctic area. Most of the animals there are animals you would spot if you venture far enough into the woods, which I think is fitting. (Technically speaking, badgers and a couple of others would probably be hibernating, but I'd rather have a larger selection of animals for variety than just a few for realism.) I really think that is up to the map maker, if the scenario is set in the winter or on a tundra or recreating the race to the South Pole (:p).

It seems to be designed as fantasy world, less realistic than the others with room for trolls, elves, unicorns, dvarves and orcs.

Hm, I'm not sure how well all of these creatures fits with the rest of the "Widelands-universe", but I do like Blacklands. Most of the animals are (in addition to being living creatures walking about the world) intended as prey for the hunters. I'm not sure trolls fit my image of prey and it would just be sad to see unicorns hunted down. We could definitely use that setting for a lot of cool things, I think it's just a matter of what fits with the rest of the game.

Ships!

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Astuur wrote: I concluded the idea of "fantasy-like" mostly from that half-human-shaped trees carrying lights.

I thought the lights were some kind of flower or fruit, but we can have illuminating flowers, can't we?

BTW: who did them - they're great -does anyone know?

The trees were added here (If you have the source version you can use the command "bzr blame filename" (or "bzr praise" or another alias) to see who last edited the file and the revision number. This is more useful with textfiles, where you can see who last touched each individual line, you still get the information for images as well.)

Creature do not have to be "huntable" (conf configurable). And I agree that orcs, trolls or unicorns would not seem right for that.

Oh, I wasn't aware of that. We just have to make sure the game keepers don't make new unhuntable creatures otherwise the map will be crawling with trolls after a while. Though the same conf setting may take care of that?

Any opinion about the "muddy waters" question?

I am not sure if I see your problem with having darker, muddy water. Could you please elaborate? The way I see it, it is easy to identify as water, and I think clear, blue, sparkling water would look more out of place. I think I remember reading something on the wiki, that Blackland was supposed to be some sort of twisted alternate dimension (there may be some overlap with my initial impression of the world, though, so I'm not sure if that is the 100% official version).

One thing I really like with Blackland is that it looks significantly different from the other worlds. This is the only place where the trees, stones and waters look different than in the other maps, which I think helps create a different environment or atmosphere. Oh, and I really like the giant mushroom trees.

Ships!

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