spud42

first test of 0.40.0 Rivers and erosion on. forgot to change the diffusion range in biome map, i usually prefer 3 its at 6 default. didnt change biome heights. left at default for first try. min town size 6 max 60 max town 10 wilderness spawn limit 300 altitude deviation 16 max altitude 100 region poi's alt deviation 16 , flatness 15 ok its an 8K as opposed to the 10K maps i usually make but this only took 1 hr 56 mins and 27 seconds plus the time halted at preview. I think this is a very usable map. a little dissapointed that with 6 traders i got 2 rekt 2 joel and 2 Jen. no hugh or bob......

im with zztong, a majority of intersection tiles is a bad idea. i know you said that its been improved since the city layout you posted the pics of , but there are a lot of poi's in the green tiles that have no roads at all. cities especially commercial and business districts generally are straight line roads. in the current vanilla tiles i find it frustrating when the lanes on the roads dissapear or at a change of tile lead into oncomming traffic ( if there was any ) . more attention needs to be taken as to how tiles fit together vanilla as well as teragon. EDIT: its a quarter past 1 am here.... brain fading fast....... trying to fix typos....

ok. this took nearly 5 hours and i would say over 4 hours was the bloody roads. This is really the bottleneck on this tool. anyway this is that quick and dirty height map i made a few weeks ago. Teragon 0.39.0 rivers on and erosion on . max cities 5 max size 60 min size 5, 250 wasteland POIs. i think i had to increase the terrain level from 8 to 16 to get these towns. check out those bloody small roads in the lower right quadrant ! drawing a height map this way does seem viable but more time more steps... towards the end on the mountains i was doing 10 to 15 block difference between painted greys. i started with a universal 10240 x 10240 at 30 grey... could be why there is @%$# all desert... would like to play around more with this but Pille needs to work on the road generation. using only 1 core of a 16 core processor is SLOW ! at 5 hours a map i can only get 1 test world in a night. those rivers though.. lol. EDIT.. hmmm bloody is ok but b u g g e r isnt? lol

just updated to 0.39.0 will test as soon as i stop playing. i must say that the rivers no matter how they were adjusted still had steep banks. However they do add an extra element to the game. how to get accross when the trader sends you 1.3 Km away and the river cuts through. do i follow the bank? left? right? do i just angle down the bank and then up the other side? ive had lots of coyotes and zeds hanging around in the rivers...

there seems to be a whole lot of off topic posts in this dev diary that used to get moved out by Rolland. seems like the mods have given up. Even a post like this used to get moved....

@bobrpggamer I think you are confusing 8 bit and 16 grey scale images with the 0-255 or 0-100 of the colourRGB. the colour doesnt have anything to do with bit depth its just an arbitrary scale for each of the primary colours. 0 being black and 255 being 100% of R or G or B. if you set the scale to 0-100 then you can think of it as 0 to 100% of R or G or B. the graphic you make is then exported as a 16bit greyscale png image. i tried to upload an image of that quick and very dirty height map but for some reason the forum kept rejecting it. ok had to resize it in paint 50% 3 times now it loads if more time is taken a quite detailed map could be produced.

ok colours in GIMP can either be 0-100 OR 0-255 . i think you can do the same in photoshop. GIMP is free and runs on every operating system. you have 2 overlapping squares that are the foreground and background colours. if you click on one you can set the RGB values and other things. In GIMP ther are 2 boxes at the top in the middle marked 0-100 and 0-255 pick one. Then you can either move sliders to adjust colour or type in the rRGB value direct. if you make all 3 the same you get grey IE black at 0,0,0, to white at 255,255,255. yes you can random lassoo areas and fill them with a colour BUT you will need to do something to blur the edges. if you have an area at say 40 grey then an area of say 50 grey you will have a vertical wall of 10 blocks on your map. Gimp has a smudge tool that looks like a finger pointing down. you can use it to blend the different heights. give me an idea of what you want a quick sketch of area size height etc and map size and i will see what i can do to make a height map. i was trying to learn how to use plasma filters etc to generate a map like this but i gave up . but the random lassoo of a random drawn area set to a colour then blended sounds easy , well easier.. Edit : quick and probably nasty height map. lasso area fil, rince repeat with different height colours. final blur with a gausian filter. 10K map proof of concept. http://gofile.me/6ZBka/TAaSbloyC

heard of a game called GO ? just a grid and black and white tokens. simlpe game. surround the opponents tokens and turn thm into yours. person with the most tokens wins. simple premise but very subtle and complex .

in gimp or photoshop make the RGB values 30 and you will get a 30 grey. you can flood fill the eniire map at 30 then save it as a base for future maps. then just set colours to 35RGB and paint on with a brush with feathered and lowered opacity. this way you can paint a height map any way you want. dont forget to save as 16 bit greyscale though..lol

i would absolutely hate to see how long it would take to generate roads/paths to all those POI's. I know this was extreme to show that the POI's in the wilderness have been fixed. but Damn thats a few days of work there..lol

the reason roads take so long isthat they basically only use 1 thread. it skips from core to core but seems like only 1 core at a time. press ctrl+shift+esc then the performance tab then on CPU. i have a 5800X with 8 cores and 16 threads. you can watch the load when generating roads etc. the initial part of generating the maps uses multiple cores. should have time this weekend to try a few more maps....trying to download height maps from tangram .

using real world height maps is cool but doesnt work if you try to use too big an area like i did with the whole of Tasmania. the map gets too compressed in the xy axis but not in the z axis . its very hard to get flatish areas without destroying the height map you captured. picking smaller areas like a city or a few square miles/Kms of terrain will be better. will have a go soon as i have free time. getting some good ideas from you guys so keep it up..

you seem to be using "world previewer.ini" as your base for generating worlds. I am using "world generator 1.ini" which is what Brad said to use in the tutorial video. I wonder if that will make any difference?

the only reference to bridges are in "create Main Roads" and "create side roads" in both there is a variable "vertical bridge offset" on main roads it is set to 0 and on side roads it is set to 1. maybe put a big number in there? or you can try a negative number? no idea what that would give as a result. its nearly 1 am and i got to go to work at 7:30... no time to test what happens. i will leave it to you to try.

i dont think it would help because i am using a custom height map. i play with the settings and the height map to get something i like. the map of Ireland took all day today. i downoaded the heightmap twice from Tangram heightmapper because i stuffed up the first one and realised that if i go f11 or full screen then on my monitor i get a 1920 x 1200 image. which i have to crop to 1200x 1200. then resize to 8192 x 8192 in this case. if i had a 4K monitor i would get a higher resolution and have to scale up less. I also tweak the curves in GIMP to compress the low to high range. I had to generate about 10 or 12 maps before i was happy to go on with generating the roads. For a quick from memory guide. i adjusted the set sea level as well as the flat water table. i adjusted the height limits for the biomes, i adjusted the wilderness poi's to 500 left the min town size to 3 and set the max town size to 60. adjusted the settings for slope allowed to build on whatever that setting was. Then kept generating maps. i do not believe that any two generations in a row are the same. so even if you had my settings and the height map i dont think we would get the same map. that is also the glory of fractals which a lot of the random generation is based on. using the settings as discussed in Brads video tutorials i have not had any issues with basic Teragon generated maps. Just take your time to check the preview to see if there are enough wilderness POI's for your liking. remember the more wilderness POI's there are the longer the road generation takes. for reference i have a Ryzen 5800X 16GB ram and run from a NVMe SSD 1 TB. the 8K previwes were taking around 15 minutes each but the final render with roads takes over 1 1/2 Hrs. roads seem to only use 1 core. you can watch on performance monitor as it stops on 1 core and switches to another.

Acceptable. Dublin is huge. there is a city near Cork. Derry is a decent size. no Belfast but there is a large "settelment" just west of it..lol No rivers. they cut the map too much and too deep. link to download map below. http://gofile.me/6ZBka/ZHgC3D7dC

@ bobrpggamer yes , they generate in cities. @ Riamus are you importing height maps from elsewhere or the generated ones from teragon? I have not had any issues with teragon height maps just the ones i import.

the top 5 cities, so the big 2 and north are generated on an area that was lassoed ans filled to 1 specific colour grey. you can clearly see an edge to them. There are going to be vertical cliffs from surrounding natural ground to the artifical flat area. A feather brush to the edges might smooth it out a bit more. but the bottom 2 cities were generated on areas that were made using the smudge tool in GIMP. they blend in better and seem more natural. these are just rough drafts of a world and in cleaning up areas for towns to generate i have mucked up the coastline in many places. A better height map capture is required or a better resource than tangram heightmapper is required. i suppose i would get more detail if i had a 4K monitor because essentially you get a screen capture and then have to scale it up. But why no wilderness poi's ???? the Tassie map almost has too many and this one has 0. at least i havent found any. on the upside the road generation was a lot quicker without all the dirt roads...

no idea, i didnt write this just trying to use it. sea level is set to 20 in teragon, if the land the river cuts through is at 100 then you are going to have a 80 m drop to water. there is no river map to adjust as far as i know teragon randomly generates them and where the cities are and how big. each generation seems different even if you dont change anything. maybe maptools could edit the river banks but 80 m is a whole lot of wide smoothing that would look weird. For now i am generating with no rivers. maybe later there will be more control on them or maybe i need to learn how to adjust the generation . I just dont know. I have been generating 10K maps because i like to travel and explore but they take a long time to generate to preview and thats before the roads are calculated. I have wilderness POI's set to a max of 500 but for some reason in the last 3 maps i generated i have 0 poi's . so thats over 30 minutes to generate a map i dont like another 30 minutes to figure out what to tweak, watch brads videos again etc. and still no wilderness pois in the render just finished. i tried Brads idea of lassoing an area in gimp and filling it with a level. i got more and bigger cities but no pois in the wilderness..... the huge flat areas look a bit weird on the map but probably ok in game.

no problems, i have played this through for 2 ingame days so far. after completing the starter quest i found my trader was on the other side of 1 off the rivers. now this is where Teragon fails a bit. The rivers cut through the land like the Grand Canyon. there is like a 50 or 60 block almost vertical wall to the rivers. they should be limit to the depth they can be and then filled with water. At the moment the water level is the "sea" level so sheer vertical walls on rivers is what you get in mountain areas.

Ok, thiss has been an ordeal. height map taken from Tangram heightmapper using Tallmanbrads tutorial on his youtube channel. its a 10K map i had to go in with GIMP and smudge some areas of the height map so cities would build at all. original had too much variations in height to let a city spawn. I noter there are a high concentration of pois creating town like areas will remain to be explored if they make sense in game. They are linked with paths/roads. check the top right of the map, it spawned 7 ship poi's . Overall the final render with errosion rivers and roads took approx 3 hours on a Ryzen 5800X . It is the roads that take all the time. watching on perofmance monitor the road making only uses 1 core. interestingly it moves cores but only ever uses 1 core at 100% for a while then switches to another core. Shows 8% CPU usage. Maybe the road generation cant use multi threads? If anybody wants it here is a link https://gofile.me/6ZBka/ehpVQ5eHi Edit: updated link 29/3/2024

the first map was my first go and the second i tweaked a few things and turned on erosion. still a bit too craggy through the mountains need more practice .

Thank you for the excellent tutorials Brad, i have nade a few maps and they work flawlessly. i did a map with erosion on and it used all 16 cores and 78% cpu, when it gets to roads it seems to only use 1 core. Is this why its slow to generate roads i know the program says roads are still a work in progress...

yes, Tallmanbrad has just put up a video on youtube showing how. i would recommend watching his videos as Teragon is easy but not straightforward to tweak things like height maps etc. i just generated an 8K world with erosion . it didnt take too long but the roads took most of it. i had 78% cpu utilisation during erosion but it drops to under 9% when generating roads and only seems to use 1 maybe 2 cores wheras the rest seemed to use all 16..still i highly recomend trying it .

i think you missed this.