Ok i got it working!
I have screenies too. download and enjoy! now comes with map that has terrain implemented!

enjoy and feel free to modify to hearts desire (just let me know, coz i want to share). get it off my homepage's downloads linked here:
Download Here! (http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=2942)

Very cool, if someone doesn't do it first, I'll try to get a screenie here -- unless you can put one up? Would be very excited to see it!

Any screenshot???

Good idea.

yes, a screenshot would be quite cool....
And you MUST make it an impassible terrain, otherwise it wouldn't work as a good mod...

lemme eat first, then i make you screenshot

the biggest problem i have (and its keeping me from posting a cool fantasy novel map) is that the lava is still passable even tho i told it impassable in terraininfo.xml. oh well. btw the lava picture was from real lava pic, fully authentic

Looks cool. :D It reminds me of the game Final Fantasy 4, where you could fly into a gigantic underground cavern that had landmasses surrounded by a sea of magma. :cool:

oh yeah! i played that one. wasnt there some dwarves down there in one of the FF's?

i kinda thought of this while reading "The Death Gate Cycle" by Weiss and Hickman (their best work) book 3, and also while i played the new fall from heaven, i though this would look cool with that too!

oh yeah! i played that one. wasnt there some dwarves down there in one of the FF's?

Yep that's the one. The dwarves had a civilization down there. And an advanced one too, because they had tanks as I recall. :lol:

didnt they say som thing silly like "whimple woo" or something? lol! we need this lava to work dammit!

didnt they say som thing silly like "whimple woo" or something? lol! we need this lava to work dammit!

I couldn't remember, so I just loaded my saved game of FF4 Advance on the gameboy, and it's "Lali Ho!". :lol:

I think it was "Rali Ho!" in the origional SNES release years ago. It's pretty common to switch the letters "R" amd "L" when translating Japanese, because of the way the language sounds.

Ahh LMAO
LOL I said "whimple-woo." That means I'm stupid. I should be my rallying cry.
:rotfl:

The original SNES version had "Lali-Ho!" :)
The new GBA version has "bomb ring" instead of "package" though :(
They both have "You spoony bard!" :D

...And yeah, FFIV's underworld is pretty awesome: it's got dwarves in tanks, a really tall tower with a supercannon, that crazy boss fight against an Evil Wall, the Sylphan Cave, and the Land of Summoned Monsters. What more could you possibly want? Oh yeah, that's right--the Developers' Room.





As for the actual point of this thread, I'd say the texture is a good start, but needs some refinements.

First off, the texture isn't really flush with itself, so you can actually see the "lines" where the tiles meet. This isn't a big problem, since all you have to do is just run it through any one of a large number of filters that are downloadable for free off the Internet.

A bit trickier is the other adjustment you'll want to make; the way the texture is, you get a sort of repeating pattern that is generally unattractive, not to mention unrealistic. Although I don't know of any real easy way of dealing with it, I'd personally start by looking at various textures that avoid the problem, and try to identify what kinds of patterns (of colors, shapes, etc.) they use.

A bit trickier is the other adjustment you'll want to make; the way the texture is, you get a sort of repeating pattern that is generally unattractive, not to mention unrealistic. Although I don't know of any real easy way of dealing with it, I'd personally start by looking at various textures that avoid the problem, and try to identify what kinds of patterns (of colors, shapes, etc.) they use.
The major way they address both problems is that they are usually just subtle shades of color -- even then it's very tricky to get them to avoid repeating.

A trick to help woudl be that the terrain features image layered on top of this would use a different pattern.

Finally, try using this texture in combination with ocean artdef values. Not sure if you can control water planes separately for different terrain or not, and whether you can specify NOT to apply water planes to a given "water" terrain. It would be better to model the texture of the lava in the 3D engine (look at the hill 3d mapping as a comparison) than in the texture itself, which is really just the color and some very faint variation.

Finally, some features thrown on top of this would really give it nice variety and realism. Check the FX folder in your unpacked art files; I've had some limited success combining them with Fallout to get good results.

Screw that, just use fallout itself...

i like you ideas. when i originally wanted this terrain, i tried and tried with the water, but all i could do was make the water look like Lake Erie, it had cloudy spots. if you can do this with the texture, let me know exactly how and i will get on this one tonite.

as far as for the texture's realism, i downloaded a real picture of lava and adapted it.

how would i use the fallout to give this a glow, that would be freaking cool.

and i still need to make this impassable if i dont use water as the base terrain.

i like you ideas. when i originally wanted this terrain, i tried and tried with the water, but all i could do was make the water look like Lake Erie, it had cloudy spots. if you can do this with the texture, let me know exactly how and i will get on this one tonite.
I'm not sure if you intend to have BOTH water AND lava on the same map. If so, I don't know how to help you. If not, you can:

1. Mod the water mask in Art > Terrain > Water > water2.dds. Maybe just change the hue so it's orange, not blue.

2. Go into XML > Misc > Civ4WaterPlaneInfos. Honestly, try experimenting with these values, knowing that they represent red/green/blue/alpha and that, I suspect, they have something to do with color collisions...

hell yeah! im getting on it!

I'm not sure if you intend to have BOTH water AND lava on the same map. If so, I don't know how to help you. If not, you can:

1. Mod the water mask in Art > Terrain > Water > water2.dds. Maybe just change the hue so it's orange, not blue.

2. Go into XML > Misc > Civ4WaterPlaneInfos. Honestly, try experimenting with these values, knowing that they represent red/green/blue/alpha and that, I suspect, they have something to do with color collisions...

this is what i ended up with (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=168880). download a maybe you can figure somethin out. i think altogether, i would rather have a reskin of plains made impassable somehow, rather than a 3d rendered sea.

I have update this mod and added a map that implements this terrain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
see top post!

Very cool.

Maybe too much yellow concentrated into one area? It looks funny with the pattern repeating itself. A minor thing really.

So you can have ocean as lava and leave coast as water? That way you could script up having both, correct?

Nope, ocean *should* work too. I used plains (useless terrain) as the base terrain, so no yellow flatlands i guess. I used my Winefromwater mod to make it look right.

Nope, ocean *should* work too. I used plains (useless terrain) as the base terrain, so no yellow flatlands i guess. I used my Winefromwater mod to make it look right.

That works. Now it'll be interesting to see what resources people put there and how they plan on getting improvements on them! ;)

Well, they better make a lava boat, coz this terrain is like the peaks (what i cut/pasted) and is impassable

It looks like you planted fallout features on the lava, yes? Looks good. You can mod the fallout XML to appear only on lava tiles. By default they disappear over time, so you probably want to set their appear and disappear rates to be the same so you can watch the effect move around the map every few turns (though it's annoying to get popups when they do).

Good work. I'd echo woodelf that keeping variation on the tile very subtle will help prevent the appearance of patterns that reduce realism. If possible, make that long stretch of texture on the right half of the texture file one big pattern rather than the same, tiled pattern you use in the little squre. (I know WHAT to do, but not HOW to do this, so if you know how, kudos to you and please share :) )

lemme see how this looks
im updating now

Depending on what graphic software you use, maybe just open up the plainsblend texture and change the Hue and Intensity to orange... the plains texture is already well-blended.

it is nicely blended, but i wanted actual lava picture adapted for texture LOL
i did bring down the yellow spots mostly to orange tho. i updated the download up top.

if someone can clean up that texure a bit, that would be cool, but i really really like using real lava pics

It definitely is nice to have more realistic textures.

Where did you get the lava pics? Can you get a pattern that's much bigger and apply it to the right half of the texture file (the one with the big long stretch and the gradient on top)?

There's also a trick to getting images to tile properly -- do a Google search to find some possibilities.

Finally, are you using the "Detail" texture as well? That might be where you can put in your shading and 3D illusion. Look at the Ice Detail for an example.

sounds interesting, but i am exhausted modding all morning and watching 2 month old... Whew!
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wanna help out?

I have been recently told this texture looks like ketchup with a little mustard mixed in :rotfl:

It can be used for LotR mod

of course, sounds very cool!

I have been recently told this texture looks like ketchup with a little mustard mixed in :rotfl:

Heh, that's what I was thinking as well. A swirl of mustard!

thats why i recomend adding fallout over lava, looks like fumes and smooths texture. wont matter coz it's impassable anyway.

all we need now is a hotdog. mmmmm.... hebrew national hotdogs

It's only too bad the plotedges can be seen so clearly...

geomodder, just the man ive been looking for.... hint hint hint

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can you give me some advice?

geomodder, just the man ive been looking for.... hint hint hint

:confused:

can you give me some advice?

I only made an observation, I wouldn't know how to solve this.

i think it has to do with very slight imperfections when i tiled it. but i dont know if i can filter or airbrush this or somethin without making it look worse.

:confused:


only jokin didnt mean to freak you out LOL

it looks like hell.haa

it certainly is hot there! maybe we could have te Lucifer Mod! Aha ha! :lol:

Could you possibly make an oil ocean?? with bubbles and steam rising from it, with bublles popping??

I could do it, but the "bubbles" would have to come from the placement of actual oil resources. In the lava mod, i used fallout to give the lava the lurid glowing effect.

Just so I understand correctly... this mod ADDS a terrain (lava) and doesn't replace a terrain?

Roger Bacon

this terrain replaces "plains" with lava. that way water and lava can go together, bu you dont get plains :(

New terrain is great.... but I wouldn't want it replacing existing terrain.

Normal plains terrain is not that good, but a plains hill is one of the best places to build a new city because the center square gets two hammers instead of one hammer. No way I'm sacrificing plains.

Is it difficult to add a new terrain? We have the ability to add extra yields to terrain now so if we can get more types of terrain in the game it would really open up the possibilities (although I don't know what kind of yield lava would have).

Roger Bacon

if you can code the xml, please post it to this thread! i would be very interested to learn how it is done as well!

Too bad it replaces plains but I can live with that. Very good job.:goodjob:

nO No please code this and then teach me the ways of the force