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A19e Nitrogen - UNSTABLE

Damocles

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Damocles Leader

Damocles

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Its been long since I recorded a video for youtube .. i honestly dont even have a proper microphone.

 

If any youtuber wants to jump in .. I have not seen any real coverage on the generator, so its a good point to present a novel way to mod the game. (I can link it to the start post then)

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Guppycur The Governor

Guppycur

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Tried following your instructions to make a nav map. Copied the dtm.raw from nav, converted to png, renamed to import_HM, stuck that in resources (backed up the old one), turned off roads, traders and small lakes, ran it and it only made biomes, genHM and main.ttw in the output folder.

 

Since I don't know how to use masking *yet*, did I do something wrong?

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Guppycur The Governor

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Hey could you elaborate more on masks? For those of us that don't know what an alpha channel is?

 

I get the red dot... put that and a city shows up. The yellow is so you can SEE the red dot. What's the blue? Are there any other colors that do cool things? Like green for trader, etc?

 

Also, when I'm loading the heightmap in photoshop, and make the new layer FOR the mask, will I have to flip it at some point? Thanks! Photoshop is NOT my forte.

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Damocles Leader

Damocles

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Hey could you elaborate more on masks? For those of us that don't know what an alpha channel is?

 

I get the red dot... put that and a city shows up. The yellow is so you can SEE the red dot. What's the blue? Are there any other colors that do cool things? Like green for trader, etc?

 

Also, when I'm loading the heightmap in photoshop, and make the new layer FOR the mask, will I have to flip it at some point? Thanks! Photoshop is NOT my forte.

 

Hi, on a run now, will clarify on the mask tomorrow

 

(you can edit the radiation-border by changing MAP_BORDER = 300 (meters) to a lower value)

Edited by Damocles (see edit history)
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bigstep70 Tracker

bigstep70

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Hey could you elaborate more on masks? Photoshop is NOT my forte.

Me either, I'm a Paint dot net guy, but its been lacking some features of late so Krita (which I hate) and Photoshop it is.

 

I've been messing with NitroGen a lot, the config file especially, and the height-maps and turbulence file, plus I've altered the shape of the snow, forest, desert and crater splats but I too am at a loss for a few things.

 

Namely the mask file (what purpose does it serve, 'cause I've been generating fairly decent worlds without altering the mask).

And roads in city hubs are a freaking mess all the time, a patchwork of asphalt, broken asphalt with gravel and pathways littered throughout. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's like the city planners said "Just throw down some roads, the buildings come later". Technically he was right, but jeez-Louise. Roads to and from Poi's and hubs are fine, it's just inside the larger clusters of buildings that the roads go haywire.

I have tried to manually edit the roads (splat3.png) file, it was long and tedious and in the end I must have done something wrong, what I don't know, but I got a tonne of console warnings (yellow) about color info being wrong on the file dtm.raw. I surmised (with Photoshop) that the merging of channels (RGBA) didn't go so well but am stumped as to what actually went wrong. Plus I'm a total noob to Photoshop, who calls "Flip Horizontal" mirror? Flipping is flipping, mirroring is totally different, oh well, whatever Adobe, thanks for the learning curve.

 

I am loving the program though, it's a god-send for those of us with krapper-potato PC's. I'll be paying lots of attention to any posts in this section and will collaborate my findings and conclusions if I think they are pertinent or haven't been covered already.

 

My next goal is to grab satellite imagery of my area (Niagara Falls baby) and work with that height-map. Should be cool to see the falls, even if they don't have water spilling over the precipice.

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Damocles Leader

Damocles

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About the mask:

 

There is an example mask in the resources folder, that uses all the current options.

You can see the output by using gen-mode "import + mask".

It will then either load the mask (mask.png) from the resources, or the world folder (needs to be manually created first) when choosing the option "import from".

You must overwrite the example mask to use you own.

 

The main purpose of the mask is to block areas to prevent POIs from spawning there.

It can be used to finetune the placement on a MANUAL map. (a manually create hightmap, although you could just reuse a generated one, or convert a dtm.raw from Navezgane or RWG to a hightmap image with the DTMtoPNG tool)

The mask will also deterr roads to cross it. But if there is no free path, it will be forced to cross the masked area.

 

 

The mask is a square image of any size (it will be scaled up to the map size internally).

 

The transparent area is free to place POIs, the opaque is blocked. It can be any color, as long as the alpha value is below 20, it will be free)

So you can use 50% transparency on the blocked area, to the the manual map below it, when using layers in photoshop.

 

within the mask you can set 3 special colors

#1 solid Red: RGB 255,0,0 (full alpha 255) -> City Spawner

#2 solid Green: RGB 0,255,0 (full alpha 255) -> Town Spawner

#3 solid yellow: RGB 255,255,0 (full alpha 255) -> help color (just to make city/town pixels more visible)

 

-> EACH pixel is considered one spawner. So only use a single pixel, and use the help color to make this pixel easier to see.

 

Towns and cities will be first placed at the points where there are spawners. Increase / decrease / config-edit the number of cities to match the

spawner count. It will only place as many cities as are selected in the dropdown.

 

 

---------

 

About the roads: you can use "city grid" option to make buildings be placed more regular, and thus make the roads more evenly placed inside cities.

The config CITY_GRID_ALIGN_RANDOMIZE can be set to 0 to remove random POIs to be misaligned, the option is there to make cities look more organic.

 

In the end you can always tough up on the splat3.png.

Make sure that it used only green and red pixels, the game is very picky about transparencies and unrecise colors.

Maybe select the precise colors, and remove all other pixels.

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bigstep70 Tracker

bigstep70

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The main purpose of the mask is to block areas to prevent POIs from spawning there. The transparent area is free to place POIs, the opaque is blocked.

 

Nice, good to know.

 

within the mask you can set 3 special colors

#1 solid Red: RGB 255,0,0 (full alpha 255) -> City Spawner

#2 solid Green: RGB 0,255,0 (full alpha 255) -> Town Spawner

#3 solid yellow: RGB 255,255,0 (full alpha 255) -> help color (just to make city/town pixels more visible)

 

Always wondered about these, thought they had to do with prefab placement and collision bounds for other prefabs but after seeing a few prefabs "slice" each other and shear whole sections off of buildings I knew better. Was wondering if this 'POI_MIN_DISTANCE_TO_OTHER' has anything to do with the collision of prefabs or was it just the fact that my cities are generating in a compact tight manner due to my 4K world sizes.

 

The config CITY_GRID_ALIGN_RANDOMIZE can be set to 0 to remove random POIs to be misaligned, the option is there to make cities look more organic.

Then I saw this and I will be playing with and fine tuning my settings some more.

 

Thanks for the hasty response. Cheers.

 

Also, what do the building colors on the previewmap.png mean, if anything. Are they related to the prefab xml zoning? I think they are!

Edited by bigstep70
last minute thought (see edit history)
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Damocles Leader

Damocles

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The colors are defined be the zones, yes. (some prefabs are assigned to multiple zone, but only one color of them is displayed)

 

POI_MIN_DISTANCE_TO_OTHER is defining the distance of POIs within the same settlement to each others outer bound.

So if you want to assure wide streets, increase this value. Else the POIs can be place with only small back-alleys between them.

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Gamida Leader

Gamida

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Damocles, is there a way to change the output folder? I would like to be able to save my maps automatically to my generated world folder instead of having to copy them. Maybe what you have now is default with option user can change it.

I make so many it would save me time lol

Edited by Gamida (see edit history)
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bigstep70 Tracker

bigstep70

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The colors are defined be the zones, yes. (some prefabs are assigned to multiple zone, but only one color of them is displayed)

That's what I thought, hence the cascading probabilities defined when NitroGen assigns zoning laws as per each prefabs xml. Too many zones defined in the xml, and it will water down the probability of it being picked for its appropriate zone... right?

 

POI_MIN_DISTANCE_TO_OTHER is defining the distance of POIs within the same settlement to each others outer bound. So if you want to assure wide streets, increase this value. Else the POIs can be place with only small back-alleys between them.

This one was really a no brainer but I wanted to be sure.

 

Thanks for going over some of the config.txt commands. Most of them are straight forward but a few still 'no touchies' for me at the moment... baby steps.

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Grue Ranger

Grue

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Is there a way to adjust the level of the surface relative to bedrock? I want the ground to be deeper so there is more dirt/stone/ore between the average surface and the bedrock without making everything into a mountain range.

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bigstep70 Tracker

bigstep70

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As far as I know this can only be done in the biomes.xml.

Within each biome modual is the breakdown of "layers to bedrock" and the terrain type and ore/precious metals you 'may' find.

Its a lot of number crunching but is possible, just not from within NitroGen.

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Gamida Leader

Gamida

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Is there a way to adjust the level of the surface relative to bedrock? I want the ground to be deeper so there is more dirt/stone/ore between the average surface and the bedrock without making everything into a mountain range.

 

I do it but I have my map perfectly flat...no hills no mountains. right now I have ground level at 175. I wouldn't know how to do it with a map that has variation already.

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Warpavp2 Refugee

Warpavp2

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Can someone please direct me to a thorough guide on how to transfer this premade world onto a dedicated server for multiplayer? Like a simple step by step. Thanks if possible! I cannot find anything on the internet on how to do it fresh.

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Gamida Leader

Gamida

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Can someone please direct me to a thorough guide on how to transfer this premade world onto a dedicated server for multiplayer? Like a simple step by step. Thanks if possible! I cannot find anything on the internet on how to do it fresh.

 

Read that post and everything after, there may have been a couple things added after it.

 

 

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?114207-Tool-NITROGEN-a-random-world-generator-for-7DtD&p=973067&viewfull=1#post973067

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