teragon maps

[Riamus]

23 minutes ago, Shinrai said:

Islands are easy to reproduce. It’s all in the height maps. 
 

As to the towns, I generated a 4k earlier for testing and got 1 city, 1 old west and 2 towns. Not a single trader on the map. That’s some terrible rng…

 

Another note, seed does not appear to affect the towns. I changed the seed manually (as I setup a townseed variable) bypassing my variable and dropped a few different seeds in with every other setting left alone, every time would generate the exact same towns.

I wasn't saying that islands can't be created.  You can obviously make a map with settings that will generate islands.  My point was that unless you try to do that, it isn't likely to occur.  And if you don't want it to occur, there are easy things to do to prevent it.  Changing the flat water map elevation, reducing mountain and hill frequency and heights, changing or not using the scale height map commands, etc.  Pille may consider adding the ability to change heights at a given location as a command in Teragon but I'm sure that would not happen anytime in the near future as there are many other things he is working on that would be of more use and interest to more users.  My suggestions are ways to avoid the problem you're experiencing (getting islands when you don't want islands) in the meantime.

 

Here's a 4k test I did.  One trader out of 3 towns.  I did another test that had no traders, so yes, it's RNG.  You can increase the chances of having at least one trader by using the priority tag on the traders in the POI Property List.  This will use those before other POI that can fit in the same location.

 

Also note that I changed the seed on towns and ended up with entirely different towns.  The first one (using [seed]) had a large town along the bottom.  This one, using 22 for seed and not changing anything else, resulted in an entirely different layout of towns.  And, just to show the difference in seeds since I didn't screenshot the one with [seed], here is another with 44 as the seed.  Again, no changes other than town seed.  Funnily enough, there are 4 traders in these 3 towns with this seed, showing that RNG is definitely playing a part.

 

Keep in mind that if there isn't room for towns to have a different layout, they could still have a single layout even with a different seed.

[spud42]

19 hours ago, Riamus said:

Strange that it's taking so long.  I can generate an 8k map with crevices in about 35min on the current build, including rivers, a crater, and main and side roads.  Cliffs will take a long time depending on your settings, as will craters and crevices.  These are similar to roads (especially side roads) in that they are going to be time consuming, so your choice is a longer generation or not using some or all of these features.

 

i left the start loop and end loop commands enabled and just disabled the crevice command. it got stuck in the loop. when i went back and disabled the two loop commands it worked fine... this was from the advanced tab of course.

 

As far as directional biomes, if you swap column A and column B, you'll get snow in the south.

 

how is this done?

Edited August 13, 2023 by spud42 (see edit history)

[Riamus]

4 hours ago, spud42 said:

i left the start loop and end loop commands enabled and just disabled the crevice command. it got stuck in the loop. when i went back and disabled the two loop commands it worked fine... this was from the advanced tab of course.

 

 

 

how is this done?

Loops shouldn't matter.  I disable the interior commands all the time.  The loop should loop however many times you set and then continue.  If you have a preset where this is occurring and getting stuck in the loop when the command(s) inside are disabled, please share it so we can find the cause and fix it.

 

Ok, so I was wrong about swapping the columns.  That doesn't appear to work.  However, you can just reverse the biomes.

Snow in the north example:

 

Snow in the south example:

 

Of course, this is just a quick example and you probably want to adjust the values to something better.

[spud42]

it was your world generator 2.ini in the default presets.

[paulj_3]

Quote

If you have a preset where this is occurring and getting stuck in the loop when the command(s) inside are disabled, please share it so we can find the cause and fix it

I had the same issue as Spud's, above (generator 2.ini), but didn't want any craters, so I had set the "# of Random Craters" to 0, and then, below that - unchecked "Add Random Craters", then hit "Run" and went to the "Expert" screen. During that "Run" I noticed that it was (high-speed) repeating a green-colored, 6-line section after the "Create Cliffed Coast" segment. I looked closer, and  it was the "---Loop Start---",  the three "Define Custom Tag" and the "Create Crater" plus "---Loop End---" I saw that "Create Crater" had an expected strikethrough line on it, but the looping still ran - endlessly. At first I thought this was normal, perhaps - but it ran unstopped for what seemed like an eternity - probably over and hour or maybe a bit more - I had actually given up watching it, and had gone to the TV for a while, but my patience eventually ran out. If it's not enabled, then I reckon it shouldn't run the loop at all. A bit of a bug?

Edited August 14, 2023 by paulj_3 (see edit history)

[Riamus]

5 hours ago, spud42 said:

it was your world generator 2.ini in the default presets.

That didn't really help as it doesn't explain what you changed and disabling commands doesn't cause the problem.

 

5 hours ago, paulj_3 said:

I had the same issue as Spud's, above (generator 2.ini), but didn't want any craters, so I had set the "# of Random Craters" to 0, and then, below that - unchecked "Add Random Craters", then hit "Run" and went to the "Expert" screen. During that "Run" I noticed that it was (high-speed) repeating a green-colored, 6-line section after the "Create Cliffed Coast" segment. I looked closer, and  it was the "---Loop Start---",  the three "Define Custom Tag" and the "Create Crater" plus "---Loop End---" I saw that "Create Crater" had an expected strikethrough line on it, but the looping still ran - endlessly. At first I thought this was normal, perhaps - but it ran unstopped for what seemed like an eternity - probably over and hour or maybe a bit more - I had actually given up watching it, and had gone to the TV for a while, but my patience eventually ran out. If it's not enabled, then I reckon it shouldn't run the loop at all. A bit of a bug?

Thank you.  This explains the problem.  It has nothing to do with disabling things.  You can't have 0 for the loop.  If you don't want craters, just disable them.  Don't set the # of craters to 0.  I'll see if Pille can do something to prevent that problem.

 

Update: Pille has put in a fix relating to the loops for the next release.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Par_A]

On 3/24/2023 at 2:42 AM, spud42 said:

Besides im Aussie. we have huge distances between cities here.... trips are discussed in how many hours not how many Kms  . . . lol

 

I'm in Canada, and we do the same. haha. How LONG does it take, not how FAR. 

 

Par

[Riamus]

4 hours ago, Par_A said:

 

I'm in Canada, and we do the same. haha. How LONG does it take, not how FAR. 

 

Par

Same in much of the US.  Partly because of long distances but also because many cities have bad traffic conditions and even 10 miles (or kilometers) could take an hour or more at certain times of the day.  So distance often isn't as important as time here either. 😁

[spud42]

On 8/15/2023 at 3:12 AM, Riamus said:

That didn't really help as it doesn't explain what you changed and disabling commands doesn't cause the problem.

 

Thank you.  This explains the problem.  It has nothing to do with disabling things.  You can't have 0 for the loop.  If you don't want craters, just disable them.  Don't set the # of craters to 0.  I'll see if Pille can do something to prevent that problem.

 

Update: Pille has put in a fix relating to the loops for the next release.

turns out i did the exact same thing as Paul. just checked that loop it has 3 define custom tag lines in it. i only disabled the craters line. when i checked the basic section it turns out i set craters to 0 there to.

[Riamus]

Just a note for everyone:

 

I programmed a utility to create POI Property Lists if you need a list for any mods or prefab packs that do not include a list.  It's a standalone EXE and can create a single list of all mods if you want, as well as separate lists for each mod if you prefer that.  It'll be available on Teragon's Discord server or from here .

Edited September 1, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[AndrewT]

On 2/5/2023 at 12:55 AM, bobrpggamer said:

I just realized something, what about traders? Are they generated at all?

 

I am a capitalist and need my commerce, so without that (hopefully added later) I will just wait.

they do spawn. traders usually spawn within the cities mainly at the corners or outskirts which happened on every map i made so far

[paulj_3]

@Riamus Hi:  A great little app to work with Teragon, but I got the message below, from Google after clicking on the link:

 

We're sorry. You can't access this item because it is in violation of our Terms of Service.

Find out more about this topic at the Google Drive Help Center.


I've always found Google to be a bit of a PITA, (along with a few others), and the only one that has really been as reliable as a clock - for me is - Microsoft's "OneDrive" . . .

 

Edited August 27, 2023 by paulj_3 (see edit history)

[Riamus]

4 hours ago, paulj_3 said:

@Riamus Hi:  A great little app to work with Teragon, but I got the message below, from Google after clicking on the link:

 

We're sorry. You can't access this item because it is in violation of our Terms of Service.

Find out more about this topic at the Google Drive Help Center.


I've always found Google to be a bit of a PITA, (along with a few others), and the only one that has really been as reliable as a clock - for me is - Microsoft's "OneDrive" . . .

I'll change the link to somewhere else.  I didn't know they wouldn't allow it there.  Looking over their list of policies, I don't see any that apply, but it doesn't really matter.

 

I updated the link to OneDrive to see if that works.  If not, I'll put it somewhere else.

Edited August 27, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[paulj_3]

Works! Thank you Sire!

[Riamus]

I updated the POI Property List creator but that caused OneDrive to change the link to the download, so I updated it above.  

 

This update uses any biome tags in the XML if available when generating the list instead of defaulting to all biomes.  If no biomes are in the Tags property of the XML, it will still default to all biomes.

Edited September 1, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Riamus]

Coming soon to Teragon (still a work in progress and the final results may be different).  This will be a great help when making maps so you can see how it would look in the game without having to load it into the game while working on the map.

 

And here's a preview video of the 3D Preview:

 

Edited September 9, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Riamus]

Update on 3D Preview...

 

Due to the changing costs for using Unity, the 3D Preview may be delayed a bit as it may get switched over to Unreal Engine instead of Unity.  But it is still coming. 

[Riamus]

POI Groups can now be used in v0.47.  This allows you to place something like the airport mod on your maps.  You can group multiple POI (including tiles) as if they were a single POI and then rotate it and place it anywhere on your map.  Note that it is possible to use [random] for the coordinates where you place it but because POI Groups are likely to be much larger than a normal POI, random placement can often not work well because it can end up being placed on top of mountains and look out of place.  So it is usually going to work best to manually place it where you want and then fill in towns and region POI.

[Riamus]

Playing around with inverting crevices in Teragon got me this:

 

That was just a quick test and I haven't done much adjusting of it yet but it's already a very interesting effect.  If you want to try something like this yourself, go into Create Crevice and look at the text box parameters for main and side crevices.  Change them to something similar to this:

 

Then just adjust the values to get an effect you like.  The height_mods lets you set elevations both positive (an inverted crevice) and negative (a normal crevice).  For regular crevices, you can use height_factors and height_sets as well but only height_mods can give you an inverted effect.  Feel free to try different things and see what you can come up with if you like this effect.

 

Here are a couple examples in forest with using Filter Guassian Blur with Sigma 1 to smooth things out.

Edited September 24, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[spud42]

interesting, but thats just what i need more walls to stop me driving around... lol

 

Does look interesting though... can you affect the width of these inverted crevices? some look a bit "Berlin wall"if you get my meaning... 

 

if you could get the crevices to alternate inverted,normal,inverted you could do some wicked iron age fort type earthworks..  look up Maiden Castle in the UK.....

[Riamus]

10 hours ago, spud42 said:

interesting, but thats just what i need more walls to stop me driving around... lol

 

Does look interesting though... can you affect the width of these inverted crevices? some look a bit "Berlin wall"if you get my meaning... 

 

if you could get the crevices to alternate inverted,normal,inverted you could do some wicked iron age fort type earthworks..  look up Maiden Castle in the UK.....

Yes, this was just a relatively quick test of the idea.  You have control over width by adding more lines to the command (the first line is the center row of the crevice and each additional line adds another row to either side of the crevice, so 1 line = 1 row, 2 lines = 3 rows, 3 lines = 5 rows, etc.).  It might take some time to put together a really wide crevice that gradually gets bigger to avoid steep sides but it can certainly be done.  You can also easily alternate between regular and inverted, so you could have the outer rows be regular crevice cut into the ground, followed by the middle part of the crevice being inverted.  I was going to test that out but didn't get around to it, though I know it will work fine.

 

And you do have control over crevice lengths, so you can avoid having these block too much area for driving around if you want.

 

As a note, I did remove embers from the inverted crevice because they float on top and cause finger-like terrain sticking up along the top, which looks really bad.  I left the smokers and lighting, though you could remove those if you want.  They do look pretty nice but are perhaps a bit too frequent when inverted.  Just remember to use Filter Gaussian Blur because it really helps how it looks.  You can set a range so it only blurs the crevice area of the map so you can get some decent blurring there without affecting the rest of your map.

Edited September 25, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Riamus]

TIP for everyone: Gateway tiles are currently only using the T gateway tile. Something ended up getting changed when updating for A21 where gateways were changed. It is an easy change to make all gateway tiles available on your towns. See the screenshot to see how it might look (though this screenshot also includes custom gateways from ZZTong). To update your presets to use additional gateway tiles, change the Read Town Property List for each town so that the towns have a gateway property added as shown below. Note that if you want to also include ZZTong's gateway tiles or any other custom gateway tiles, you can use the second Town Property List below for ZZTong's and add any other custom gateway tiles to the list, separated by commas the same way the others are. You can have different gateways for different town types as well if you don't want certain gateway tiles on certain town types. Just adjust the list of gateway tiles to include only what you like. Anything in the list will be randomly used on your towns.

 

regular_town;7;any;center:downtown,commercial,industrial;outskirt:rural,residential,countrytown;gateway:rwg_tile_gateway_straight,rwg_tile_gateway_straight2,rwg_tile_gateway_intersection2,rwg_tile_gateway_t
small_town;3;8;outskirt:residential,countrytown,countryresidential;gateway:rwg_tile_gateway_straight,rwg_tile_gateway_straight2,rwg_tile_gateway_intersection2,rwg_tile_gateway_t
oldwest_town;1;4;outskirt:oldwest;gateway:rwg_tile_gateway_straight,rwg_tile_gateway_straight2,rwg_tile_gateway_intersection2,rwg_tile_gateway_t

 

Here's one with ZZTong's gateway tiles since I know many people use his modlet.

regular_town;7;any;center:downtown,commercial,industrial;outskirt:rural,residential,countrytown;gateway:rwg_tile_gateway_straight,rwg_tile_gateway_straight2,rwg_tile_gateway_intersection2,rwg_tile_gateway_t,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_01,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_02,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_03,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_04,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_05,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_06,rwg_tile_gateway_t_zztong_01
small_town;3;8;outskirt:residential,countrytown,countryresidential;gateway:rwg_tile_gateway_straight,rwg_tile_gateway_straight2,rwg_tile_gateway_intersection2,rwg_tile_gateway_t,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_01,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_02,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_03,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_04,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_05,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_06,rwg_tile_gateway_t_zztong_01
oldwest_town;1;4;outskirt:oldwest;gateway:rwg_tile_gateway_straight,rwg_tile_gateway_straight2,rwg_tile_gateway_intersection2,rwg_tile_gateway_t,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_01,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_02,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_03,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_04,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_05,rwg_tile_gateway_straight_zztong_06,rwg_tile_gateway_t_zztong_01

 

 

Just note that the rwg_tile_gateway_intersection is the highway on/off ramp tile, so doesn't work for town gateway tiles and so I left it off.

 

The random gateways should come back in one of the upcoming updates to Teragon but you can do this for the time being. Once random gateways work again in Teragon without needing the gateway property, I'd recommend removing that so it will pick up any additional gateway tiles that may be added in vanilla or with custom gateway tiles without having to update your presets.

 

 

EDIT: Ok, so I'm going to leave this post here but it was just pointed out to me that the default presets was updated to use the gateway property already, so if you're using the default presets, you're already all set.  But if you are using a preset made before that change was added, you may not have this (as I didn't) and so I'm leaving this so you can know how to update it.

Edited September 25, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Par_A]

Hi folks,

 

I'm making an 8k map in Teragon. I'm starting with the heightmap, biome map, and road map (splat3) from a previous 10 k A20 game. I scaled it down to 8k in GIMP.

 

My goal is to start with the terrain, biomes, and roads I created before, build the map from those, and then let Teragon populate it. As I understand the docs, it will avoid placing pois on existing roads.

 

I hope to import the splat3 file before it does the town building. "Import Road Map" comes just before "Create Towns" in the que. The heightmap and biome map import just fine. However, when the que gets to "Import Road Map," Teragon either quits or sits there with 'processing roads' stuck at 3% forever, until I quit the app.

 

Any ideas most welcome.

[spud42]

sorry to state the obvious but there must be something amiss with the road map. is this the exact map used in A20? you said you scaled it down,have you tried at full size? maybe something in the scale down went wrong?loss of alpha chanel? not sure as i never did anything other than height maps with Teragon

[Par_A]

Hi spud. Yeah, I tried creating a 10k world with the original heightmap, biomes, and splat3 and exactly the same thing happens. I can watch the percent of progress indicator while it's it processing the heightmap and the biome map, but when it does the splat3 file it gets to 3% and Teragon quits.

 

It's the same for the 10k or the 8k files.

 

There are two types of splat 3 files; the black-red-green one that MapToolz provides, and the final seemingly transparent one that the final map uses. I've tried both in both 8k and 10k and the same thing happens.

 

I continue to plug away at this. haha

Edited October 18, 2023 by Par_A (see edit history)