teragon maps

[spud42]

never mind. hopped on discord and fixed my mistakes... trying to generate a decent Tassie for a21.

 

[spud42]

ok here is a link to an A21 version of Tassie.....  will be challenging as there is a lot of open space.

 

https://gofile.me/6ZBka/xJLsd78df

Edited April 2 by spud42 (see edit history)

[Riamus]

On 3/30/2024 at 3:11 AM, spud42 said:

never mind. hopped on discord and fixed my mistakes... trying to generate a decent Tassie for a21.

 

Glad you figured it out. 

[Riamus]

I know it's been a while since the last update to Teragon, so I thought I'd give you some information regarding the next version.  Still not sure when it'll be ready.

 

Just to be very clear... these are for the next version of Teragon (v0.50.0) and are not currently available or are available only in the Testing version at this time.  This information is just for reference regarding the next version.

 

For those interested in very large cities, including mega cities, you will now be able to have more variety in the district layout by using 2 new parameters in Create Towns.  One parameter sets up the overall shape variance and the other helps to break up districts so you can have more than one of each district within a town.  Here is an example of a 4k mega city with more extreme adjustments to those parameters.  Chances are that you'll want to not go quite as extreme but it's entirely up to you.

This is in comparison to the current mega cities, where you get one of each district and the districts are kind of diamond-shaped every time.  Be aware that these parameters are not going to really be noticeable on smaller towns (anything under 30-50 or so probably won't see any difference).  Also note that if you use the parameters to break up districts in a medium sized town, such as 50 tiles, you may end up with a number of 1 tile districts within the town that may not look great in the game.  So be careful adjusting these parameters if your towns are medium-sized.  Default small_town and oldwest_town sizes will not really be affected but your default regular_town towns will be where you might see these changes.  I'd recommend double checking your towns to see if the districts look okay if you adjust these parameters.

 

Also note that, unless something changes, it will also be possible to have the outskirt section of towns be larger than a single tile ring around the town.  Pille is planning to set that up tomorrow so unless there is some problem with it, it will also be available in the next version.  This again is mainly for very large towns and mega cities, allowing you to not have a single tile ring around the town that looks pretty strange.  For smaller towns, you don't want to have a wider outskirt because it will remove too much (or all) of your center districts.  But for towns of a few hundred tiles up to thousands of tiles, it can really help.  EDIT: Here is a screenshot with a wider outskirt area and changing the variation and clusters of districts for the outskirt, similar to what is done in the center area.  So you can now see everything getting mixed up.  You can of course adjust the values so it's not as extreme if you want.

 

The other main new command will allow you to use stamps.  This isn't currently ready for testing, so I can't give you any screenshots yet, but it will allow you to use custom stamps (basically miniature heightmaps) and place them around your map.  Think of RWG rivers as an example.  Each river is a stamp and looks exactly the same and are just placed randomly around the map.  Using stamps in Teragon will have more options than how rivers are handled in RWG.  You will be able to use any custom stamps that you or others create and these can be clustered in groupings of whatever size you want and can overlap one another.  This can allow you to do things like sand dunes or even offer the ability to take the "perfect" crater or crevice you made in a map and use that exact one as a stamp on other maps.  You could make a swamp or mesas or any number of different things using stamps.  Even though stamps are not generated and so look the same each time they are used, by grouping them and overlapping them, it can help to make these look different.  And because you can use a lot of different stamps if you have them, it will not be as noticeably repetitive as the RWG rivers.  It should allow for some very interesting maps to be made.

 

I have a feeling that once stamps are available, you will start to see people sharing the stamps they create, which will make adding interesting features to your maps very easy even if you're not good at making your own stamps.  We'll most likely have a place for stamps to be shared in Discord and people are welcome to share stamps in this thread or post them on places like Nexus (I assume that Nexus would allow that kind of posting, though I don't actually know).

 

I think this next version will be something to look forward to and I know I am looking forward to seeing what everyone can do with stamps.

 

 

Btw, on a side note, if anyone has any questions about anything with Teragon, please PING me here when you write your post.  I don't always see what people post here right away.  But if you ping me, I'll notice and you'll get a faster reply.  The other way to receive faster responses it to ask in #discussions on Teragon's Discord.  Otherwise, I'll get back to you whenever I notice that you asked a question.

Edited April 1 by Riamus (see edit history)

[spud42]

ok, i think i have asked before but cant remember..

Most real life cities and suburbs are designed on a grid.

in 7DTD the roads stop turn around on themselves, 4 lane roads turn into 2 lane roads. 

Is this a limitation of TFP tiles? some tiles seem to be slightly offset from others. so they dont meet correctly. Looking at the google earth of Phoenix you can see its a grid of main roads with a smaller grid of local raods . Like most towns. yes in the suburbs they sometimes get twisty in very local roads but still most are straight roads..

 

Can this be done in Teragon? are there any parameters to set for this?

 

on another note those cites are huge... lag for sure. 

Is there a way to paint a town map? like set up a wide ring of suburbs with small comercial areas and indusrty areas and maybe a central area for all the skyscrapers?  Or do we have to try a few parameters and keep generating maps till the city looks like something we would like? 

 

No critisim of Teragon, its great fun to make maps.

[Riamus]

47 minutes ago, spud42 said:

ok, i think i have asked before but cant remember..

Most real life cities and suburbs are designed on a grid.

in 7DTD the roads stop turn around on themselves, 4 lane roads turn into 2 lane roads. 

Is this a limitation of TFP tiles? some tiles seem to be slightly offset from others. so they dont meet correctly. Looking at the google earth of Phoenix you can see its a grid of main roads with a smaller grid of local raods . Like most towns. yes in the suburbs they sometimes get twisty in very local roads but still most are straight roads..

 

Can this be done in Teragon? are there any parameters to set for this?

 

on another note those cites are huge... lag for sure. 

Is there a way to paint a town map? like set up a wide ring of suburbs with small comercial areas and indusrty areas and maybe a central area for all the skyscrapers?  Or do we have to try a few parameters and keep generating maps till the city looks like something we would like? 

 

No critisim of Teragon, its great fun to make maps.

This is a limitation of how tiles work.  Vanilla tiles use a variety of different roads so that they don't all look exactly the same.  This means that connecting tiles to one another doesn't always look quite right if you really pay attention.  There isn't really any way around that other than to use other tiles that have a more consistent design to the roads.  But then it'll just look very repetitive.

 

As far as grids, you can do that in Teragon.  However, again, with the way tiles work in the game, not every POI can be placed on intersection tiles, which means you will lose out on a lot of POI if you have it set to be grid roads.

[spud42]

yep i thought it wasa TFP tile limitation.. they just dont link together.

Its like knock off LEGGO blocks... they look ok but you cant mix them with the real thing ...lol

[Riamus]

4 hours ago, spud42 said:

yep i thought it wasa TFP tile limitation.. they just dont link together.

Its like knock off LEGGO blocks... they look ok but you cant mix them with the real thing ...lol

This is something that hopefully Teragon can do in the future.  A dynamic tile group mechanic is on the list of things to add.  That would allow making specific tiles only connect to other specific tiles.  So you could have 2 lane roads only connect to other 2 lane roads or to tiles that are designed to look like a 2 lane road connects to a 4 lane road.  You could make boulevards connect only to other boulevards or to tiles that are designed for merging those into a normal road.  This could be used also for raised roads, subways, sewers, even rivers that are on tiles.  It would definitely open up some great options for making very interesting and more believable roads in towns.

 

However, the downside to such a feature is that we actually need a bunch of tiles of those types for it to work and few people are making custom tiles.  For example, if you wanted boulevards, you would need to create at least 1 boulevard tile for each tile type for each district where you'd like boulevards to appear.  So that's a minimum of 1 tile each of straight, corner, T, intersection, cap that has a boulevard on it as well as a minimum of 1 tile for each of those that has a merging road from boulevard to 2-lane.  You might also want one of each with a merge from boulevard to 4-lane.  And that's just for boulevards.

 

If you want to handle 2-lane to 4-lane, you need custom tiles there as well, though fewer since we do already have some 2-lane for 4-lane tiles to work with.  They'd just need to be filled out to have at least one each for each tile type and a merge tile for each tile type.

 

It would be an amazing feature to have and it'll likely become available at some point, but unless someone wants to make the custom tiles to work with it, it will end up not having much use.  We'll just have to see if anyone's willing to make those tiles once the feature is available.  The problem with that is that 1) such tiles won't work well in RWG because there's no way to connect them properly in RWG and few designers want to make stuff that will only work in Teragon, and 2) not many designers even want to make tiles.  So we will see how it works out. 

[spud42]

how hard is it to make a tile?

 

Sounds like we would be making a custom map like navazgane... 

 

Edited April 4 by spud42 (see edit history)

[Riamus]

3 hours ago, spud42 said:

how hard is it to make a tile?

 

Sounds like we would be making a custom map like navazgane... 

 

A tile isn't all that hard to make.  In some ways, it is easier than a POI because there is usually a lot less building needed.  On the other hand, you need to find ways to make the tiles look unique so they aren't all the same and that can be harder than with making a POI.  Also, you need to set up the POI markers for the prefabs and that can sometimes get tricky to get things placed in a way that will look right when random POI get placed there.

 

So, it isn't difficult exactly, but it is a different kind of design than prefab design and not everyone wants to do that.  It also isn't as eye catching as a good prefab, so isn't as interesting to make it share.  But having a lot of custom tiles can really improve how a town looks.

[spud42]

hmmmm. Looking in 7days to die/data/prefabs/RWGTiles it seems each tile has 6 parts. 

.blocks.nim

.ins

.jpg

.mesh 

.tts

.xml

all prefixed by the tile name for example rwg_tile_commercial_cap

is there a tool to generate these files? Reading the xml file there is a structure to the file that seems so far to be the same with the variations being where each poi can spawn on this tile.. 

 facinating to see how it works.. easier to try to figure out the rural tiles with less stuff on them lol. this is the easier part the other files i have no idea of except the jpg of course . its a picture of the tile. 

[Riamus]

11 hours ago, spud42 said:

hmmmm. Looking in 7days to die/data/prefabs/RWGTiles it seems each tile has 6 parts. 

.blocks.nim

.ins

.jpg

.mesh 

.tts

.xml

all prefixed by the tile name for example rwg_tile_commercial_cap

is there a tool to generate these files? Reading the xml file there is a structure to the file that seems so far to be the same with the variations being where each poi can spawn on this tile.. 

 facinating to see how it works.. easier to try to figure out the rural tiles with less stuff on them lol. this is the easier part the other files i have no idea of except the jpg of course . its a picture of the tile. 

Tiles are made in the POI Editor in the game just like all other POI.  There should be a few YouTube videos about making tiles.

[zztong]

On 4/2/2024 at 10:11 AM, spud42 said:

Most real life cities and suburbs are designed on a grid.

 

That's certainly true in flat lands, but not true in mountains or hills. Much of AZ would support the grids.

 

To get a nice blend of grid vs suburb, I think you'd need a world generator to do something like set aside every 3rd row and column of Tiles to be nothing except intersection tiles.

 

On 4/4/2024 at 9:12 AM, spud42 said:

how hard is it to make a tile?

 

Raimus describes it accurately. It can be really easy unless you want to get into some really nice filler between the POI markers. A very basic tile would be POI markers, roads, and trees. A Gateway Tile often involves some Parts to integrate with different types of roads, though that doesn't always work in RWG. I assume that's an A21 bug.

 

The filename is important with Tiles as it indicates the District and Road configuration.

[Laz Man]

Tile design is very intricate.  There are alot of things to consider such as how many POI markers can fit into one and what variation of road placement can you have. 

 

For example, it is generally bad to design alot of roads on the edge of a tile since it creates strange parallel roads when 2 such tiles would happen to be placed next to each other.

[Riamus]

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

Tile design is very intricate.  There are alot of things to consider such as how many POI markers can fit into one and what variation of road placement can you have. 

 

For example, it is generally bad to design alot of roads on the edge of a tile since it creates strange parallel roads when 2 such tiles would happen to be placed next to each other.

Of course, we also have strange situations with vanilla tiles already.  An unfortunate side effect of tiles when there are so few of them is that designers like making unique tiles and the tiles often don't really merge well with one another.  Numbers of lanes changing repeatedly along a road, road borders not always lining up between districts, crazy corners in odd places, guard rails between tiles that get placed facing one another....

 

I think I would prefer having more tiles, even if they aren't "perfect" just to help diversify the towns and allow for more variety in how things can look.  But I do agree that tiles need to have some kind of cohesion between one another so the town looks at least somewhat okay.  At some point, Teragon will offer the ability to dynamically place tiles with specific restrictions on which ones can attach to each tile.  This can allow for much more variety without randomization messing up the overall look.  For example, you'll be able to have boulevards that don't randomly go from one lane to two and back again over and over or raised roads that don't suddenly become not raised, etc.  But that's down the road a bit.  It would be great to have something like that in RWG as well but I kind of don't think it'll happen.

[Laz Man]

22 minutes ago, Riamus said:

Of course, we also have strange situations with vanilla tiles already.  An unfortunate side effect of tiles when there are so few of them is that designers like making unique tiles and the tiles often don't really merge well with one another.  Numbers of lanes changing repeatedly along a road, road borders not always lining up between districts, crazy corners in odd places, guard rails between tiles that get placed facing one another....

 

I think I would prefer having more tiles, even if they aren't "perfect" just to help diversify the towns and allow for more variety in how things can look.  But I do agree that tiles need to have some kind of cohesion between one another so the town looks at least somewhat okay.  At some point, Teragon will offer the ability to dynamically place tiles with specific restrictions on which ones can attach to each tile.  This can allow for much more variety without randomization messing up the overall look.  For example, you'll be able to have boulevards that don't randomly go from one lane to two and back again over and over or raised roads that don't suddenly become not raised, etc.  But that's down the road a bit.  It would be great to have something like that in RWG as well but I kind of don't think it'll happen.

 

The history of RWG maps is an interesting one.  I remember back in the days before tiles were introduced how POIs were placed strictly by code in a grid and felt very disconnected / unnatural.

 

What I appreciate about the tile system is it eased some of the responsibility off of programming to create a natural looking city scape through code and pushed some of that responsibility onto the level designers.

 

Although still not perfect I feel it was a huge improvement.  We have some new RWG and tile updates coming in A22.  Stay tuned. 😎

[Riamus]

2 hours ago, Laz Man said:

 

The history of RWG maps is an interesting one.  I remember back in the days before tiles were introduced how POIs were placed strictly by code in a grid and felt very disconnected / unnatural.

 

What I appreciate about the tile system is it eased some of the responsibility off of programming to create a natural looking city scape through code and pushed some of that responsibility onto the level designers.

 

Although still not perfect I feel it was a huge improvement.  We have some new RWG and tile updates coming in A22.  Stay tuned. 😎

Don't get me wrong, I love the tiles. 

[spud42]

i agree but there should be some limitation on how many of the same tile can be put in a row.  I had a map recently where the same tile/ farm was 4 in a row along the street...

 

I'm too old and lazy to learn how to make tiles.. leave that up to younger people.. was just curious what was involved...

 

 

 

this is the new Tassie map i made... nice wide rivers.... i wish that 7DTD didnt let the air drops land on water. that would be a nice QOL improvement!

 

another view of the river... 7DTD can be quite beautiful!

[Riamus]

23 minutes ago, spud42 said:

i agree but there should be some limitation on how many of the same tile can be put in a row.  I had a map recently where the same tile/ farm was 4 in a row along the street...

 

I'm too old and lazy to learn how to make tiles.. leave that up to younger people.. was just curious what was involved...

 

 

 

this is the new Tassie map i made... nice wide rivers.... i wish that 7DTD didnt let the air drops land on water. that would be a nice QOL improvement!

 

another view of the river... 7DTD can be quite beautiful!

The problem is that there is currently only one vanilla tile of each type in each district (with maybe an exception or two).  So if you have a few intersections in a row that are the same district, you'd have the same tile in a row.  The same for most other types (caps aren't likely to be in a row).  Having additional tiles available can greatly improve this.  Just adding ZZTong's modlet will have a big impact on the variety you see and if you add some more custom tiles, it'll help even more.  By what LazMan said, it sounds like A22 will come with some more tiles (unless he meant just changes to tiles) so that will also help.

 

That being said, the next release of Teragon has the new parameters I mentioned above relating to breaking up districts and providing variations in districts.  Although that will definitely be more noticeable in larger towns, it should also help in smaller towns (maybe about 12-20 size) to break things up a bit.  By having the districts not quite so homogenous, you'll get more variety in tiles that are in a row.  The downside with smaller towns if you use these parameters is that the districts might not seem quite as cohesive as you might like.  So there is definitely some give and take with it for what looks best.  Adding more custom tiles will still be the best option.

 

It also depends on the tiles.  When you see something like two vanilla industrial caps next to one another, they are going to look very similar because they only have (IIRC) one large prefab on them.  There are a few different prefabs that can go on them (the various factories), but it's still just one building and then the tile.  So they can look very repetitive.  On the other hand, if you have two corner tiles of the same district next to one another, they usually don't look too repetitive because there are many prefabs on them and you'll get a lot of different ones so it doesn't look the same.  So tiles that have more prefabs on them shouldn't look quite as repetitive as those with only one or two prefabs.  But even so, more tiles is best.

 

As far as your example, if it was a Teragon map, you shouldn't have had the same farm multiple times in a row.  Are you sure they weren't different farms?  Those can look very similar to one another.  The default distance in Teragon between duplicate POI if using the default presets is 300m.  So as long as a POI doesn't have a different distance set, they should be a minimum of 2 tiles apart (one tile between).  There are exceptions, of course.  If nothing can go in a spot while following the distance restrictions and other restrictions that you might have set, Teragon will fill the spot with something even though it normally shouldn't go there unless you're using the enforce properties for that POI.  But for that to happen to the same prefab 4 times in a row is pretty unlikely.  I won't say it can't happen, but it shouldn't.

 

Note: If you're using a preset that is an edited version of an older default preset, you may not have the default distance parameters in your POI Property List.  If you do not have those, you may get POI that are on repeating tiles because the normal distance without that is something pretty small.  So that might also be the cause.  You might want to copy/paste the POI Property List from the current version of the default presets into your preset if you didn't make changes to your POI Property List to make sure you have all the current parameters.  That, or start a new preset that is based on the current default presets instead of editing a preset you've been using/editing for a long time.

Edited April 20 by Riamus (see edit history)

[spud42]

it was a RWG map not teragon.. if i remember it was the first game of the new a21. i wanted to see the funpimps rwg before i started a teragon map.

 

i am also not American so a lot of things that seem off to me could just be the way Americans do things??  like driving on the wrong side of the road...lol joke dont get your knickers in a twist...lol

Edited April 20 by spud42 (see edit history)

[zztong]

On 4/16/2024 at 9:55 PM, Riamus said:

I think I would prefer having more tiles, even if they aren't "perfect" just to help diversify the towns and allow for more variety in how things can look.

 

I agree. What I refer to "Tile Content", structures and landmarks built onto the Tile, can lead to the Flintstone effect. That is, you can keep passing the same lake and dogleg in the road, again and again. The same round-about, the same cul-de-sac, the same overpass... I noticed it the most in the Gateway Tiles.

 

6 hours ago, Riamus said:

When you see something like two vanilla industrial caps next to one another, they are going to look very similar because they only have (IIRC) one large prefab on them.

 

Yes, exactly that. From memory, a rural T when the rural district is used to wrap around a city or town.

 

On 4/16/2024 at 10:28 PM, Laz Man said:

We have some new RWG and tile updates coming in A22.

 

Oh cool, I'm looking forward to seeing them.

 

6 hours ago, Riamus said:

Just adding ZZTong's modlet will have a big impact on the variety you see and if you add some more custom tiles, it'll help even more. 

 

Yes, I fell in love with Tiles. I got into POIs because I wanted more map variety and Tiles were a pretty significant addition. I'm just getting to the point where the Gateway Tiles don't repeat very often on a large map.

 

6 hours ago, Riamus said:

The default distance in Teragon between duplicate POI if using the default presets is 300m.

 

That's the default DuplicateRepeatDistance in RWG too.

 

5 hours ago, spud42 said:

like driving on the wrong side of the road

 

Heh, I've heard that mentioned before. @stallionsden In 7d2d you can drive on any side of the road you want. Do you remember the old Car Wars slogan: "Don't like my driving? Stay off the sidewalk."

[Gamida]

7 hours ago, spud42 said:

 

this is the new Tassie map i made... nice wide rivers.... i wish that 7DTD didnt let the air drops land on water. that would be a nice QOL improvement!

 

 

I am guessing the water drops are to justify the perk for increasing your time being underwater...or maybe the perk was added because drops landed in water

 

 

[warmer]

This is the best Nuke in a city maps I've made so far. With my wasteland biomes tweaks there are a lot more broken buildings and fewer trees.

It just feels more setting appropriate

[Riamus]

Update for the next release...

 

Scale Height Map can now be used on specific biomes.  Depending on how you do your settings, you can get some pretty interesting transitions between biomes.  In this example, I scaled snow and wasteland up a lot and so I got these cliffs.  Not exactly what you want on your actual map but it shows what you can do.  With less scaling, you can still get specific biomes to be raised higher than others or lower mountains in specific biomes.

 

Below are 2 more examples, where I used separate Scale Height Map commands for each biome, with them scaling the biome up most for the highest biome and less for each lower biome.  I also increased the smoothing for the biome transition area.  The effect you get is a slight change in elevation between biomes.  With a bit of adjustment, this has potential to make for some interesting maps.

 

Icons will now appear next to your selected command and any related commands.  In this screenshot, I have a heightmap command selected, so all heightmap commands show the mountain icon next to them.  This makes it easy to find all related commands.  Different commands have different icons.

 

New command: Create Single Town.  This new command lets you create a town in a specific location.  It is not a replacement for using a Mask Map but gives you an alternate way to place towns in specific locations.  Mask Maps let you specify where towns can be placed and they will be placed only within the bounds of the mask.  This command lets you specify a starting point for the town and it will then generate a town in that area but the town is not confined to a specific location the way it would be with Mask Maps.  You can select the town type that you want to place with this command.

 

New parameter for Create Towns allows you to balance the number of each tile variant you have on your map.  Tile variants are tiles that share the same district and the same tile type.  For example, if you have 5 tiles for the Residential district that are Corner tiles, this parameter will attempt to place an equal number of each of those 5 variants on your map.  If unchecked, this is entirely random, making it possible to have a lot of one variant and none of another variant.  Prior versions were random (i.e. unchecked).  This will likely help those of you who are using custom tiles.  It won't make much difference if you're only using vanilla tiles as there are not usually any variants to choose from, though it sounds like that may change in 1.0/A22.

 

New parameters weight_outskirt and weight_center for the Town Property List allow you to have more or less of specific districts in the center or outskirt area of your town.  For example, if you have 3 districts (commercial, downtown, industrial) in the center of your town, you would normally get about the same number of tiles for each district.  If you choose to weight the downtown district at twice the others, you will see about twice the downtown tiles in your town than the other districts.

 

 

These are in addition to the new items I mentioned above.  And stamps are almost ready for initial testing, so we are getting closer to having them ready.  There are also some new things that are being looked at that may or may not appear in the next release.  These include creating plateaus, placing rivers along the transition area between biomes, so each biome is separated by a river, and automatically filling any basins (depressions) on your map with water, regardless of what elevation it is at on your map, if it meats certain criteria.  So there are a lot of things to look forward to in the next release and the following releases.

Edited May 1 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Riamus]

A quick example of rivers being placed at biome boundaries...

 

This could make fore some interesting maps but requires some trial and error to get something that will work well in the game.  Many biome transitions go straight through mountains with noise biomes, which end up looking bad.  If you use environmental biomes, you can end up with a circle river around a mountain.  A handcrafted biome map could be the best use for this option.