C2C Graphics

I'm not following you here...
How would that work? Would current ocean terrain be close to land with the coast feature on it... I'm pretty sure ocean graphic would blend really bad with the landmass; and I'm not sure if a feature could fix it.
There would be some places where there is land without a continental shelf. Take Hawaii for example. We'd have to see how it blends into land and ensure it still works fine to do so.
Coast is a definition on cities and buildings also. IE they require coastal which is land next to coast.

This is my concern. There are MANY definitions that base themselves off 'coast' terrain. Promos, Movement rules, trade route definitions, building access etc.

I may be able to find a solution where we can get rid of coast as a terrain itself and instead replace it with a coded denotation of coast that not only displays on the tile hover help panel but also works with all coastal indicators, a solution very similar to the way peaks are maintained. This would enable us to maintain all the same coast rules we currently have but would allow us to define the actual terrain with the settings we're proposing here instead.


This project would have to include quite a bit of AI to it. And it would also entail someone with the knowhow to go in and manipulate all of the map scripts to work with these terrains.
 
There would be some places where there is land without a continental shelf. Take Hawaii for example. We'd have to see how it blends into land and ensure it still works fine to do so.
There is atm a blending issue but I will look into it; perhaps there is a way to rectify that.

And if you could make it so in the code, that the game consider all water terrain adjacent to land as coast (except perhaps lake shore), I guess that would be neat.
 
The problem is that coast is not about the depth of the ocean but about sailing while remaining insight of land. The current coast/ocean terrains have nothing to do with anything below the surface of the water but are totally about navigation.
 
The problem is that coast is not about the depth of the ocean but about sailing while remaining insight of land. The current coast/ocean terrains have nothing to do with anything below the surface of the water but are totally about navigation.

Correct, that is exactly the reasoning behind this discussion. What if we want to define depth both technically (for the sake of submarines/other) and graphically without adding lots of new terrains and at the same time not change any game mechanics (like boat navigation only in closest tile to land until astronomy).
 
There is another problem with coast/ocean features in that the map scripts will only place them near starting points if they change the yield. This is the main reason we don't have islands yet and why starting positions almost always have a lot of kelp or sea grass while else where there is very little. It is the reason coral and rocky reefs don't have positive yield changes.
 
@TB:

This is the only solution I could find that has minimal graphical glitches for having deep ocean graphic adjacent to land.
Spoiler :


But this would mean having 6-9 Water terrains excluding the two lake terrains.

Tropical/Polar/Temperate - Continental Shelf (this one could be condensed to only 1 terrain, but that would mean that all shallow ocean would look the same)
Tropical/Polar/Temperate - Ocean (Cannot touch land)
CoastalTrench (Could be dropped altogether. Must touch land)
Trench (Cannot touch land)
DeepCoast (Must touch land)

Now I will rant a bit, no need to read on unless curious about terrain graphics:

The reason this is so technically difficult is due to terrains incapability to blend different with two different terrains besides looking at what layer a terrain is in. Since Blending with land got to be so visually different in the texture than blending with other water textures; an interface terrain is mandatory to connect water and land based terrain.

For example:

-Polar ocean can blend fine with ocean, coast and polar coast due to their similar interface.

-While a coast terrain texture contains color and patterns for a beach along with water this beach part of it's texture blends down on land terrain which are in a lower terrain layer while it gets hidden underneath the opaque part of an higher layered ocean terrain

-If I were to paint in a beach in the ocean texture which is necessary for land blending. This beach would be visible between polar and normal ocean as strange (not blue) belt around the ocean. There are a dozen other glitches and paradoxes that would appear as well, but they are to difficult to explain.

To make matters worse a terrains texture is divided into X squares, and what square is used is based on how many of the same terrain is in the four tiles around the corner of a tile. Oh yeah I forgot to mention that the texture square is not centered in a tile but on its corner so it covers 1/4 of 4 tiles.

Ach, this is complicated s*it.
 

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@Toffer,
So this explains why the Grid (if turned On) is missing now on ocean tiles. And a Mountain tile(s) next to the Ocean can have it's tile divided in 1/4 Grid lines.

I suppose I should post a screen shot, heh?

JosEPh
 
@TB:

This is the only solution I could find that has minimal graphical glitches for having deep ocean graphic adjacent to land.
Spoiler :


But this would mean having 6-9 Water terrains excluding the two lake terrains.

Tropical/Polar/Temperate - Continental Shelf (this one could be condensed to only 1 terrain, but that would mean that all shallow ocean would look the same)
Tropical/Polar/Temperate - Ocean (Cannot touch land)
CoastalTrench (Could be dropped altogether. Must touch land)
Trench (Cannot touch land)
DeepCoast (Must touch land)

Now I will rant a bit, no need to read on unless curious about terrain graphics:

The reason this is so technically difficult is due to terrains incapability to blend different with two different terrains besides looking at what layer a terrain is in. Since Blending with land got to be so visually different in the texture than blending with other water textures; an interface terrain is mandatory to connect water and land based terrain.

For example:

-Polar ocean can blend fine with ocean, coast and polar coast due to their similar interface.

-While a coast terrain texture contains color and patterns for a beach along with water this beach part of it's texture blends down on land terrain which are in a lower terrain layer while it gets hidden underneath the opaque part of an higher layered ocean terrain

-If I were to paint in a beach in the ocean texture which is necessary for land blending. This beach would be visible between polar and normal ocean as strange (not blue) belt around the ocean. There are a dozen other glitches and paradoxes that would appear as well, but they are to difficult to explain.

To make matters worse a terrains texture is divided into X squares, and what square is used is based on how many of the same terrain is in the four tiles around the corner of a tile. Oh yeah I forgot to mention that the texture square is not centered in a tile but on its corner so it covers 1/4 of 4 tiles.

Ach, this is complicated s*it.

Actually, this is perfect. It means that we still need coastal definitions on terrains and we just add a LOT more terrain types to coasts and oceans. That's actually quite helpful as it will mean there's not a huge mess of coding to attend to. So it means more work for xml defining and art and more work for adapting the mapscripts and there's still a lot of coding to do for the depth considerations and interactions, but it also means that we get to bypass a lot of coding that could inadvertently add a LOT of potential bugs.

So it may seem like more work but it takes a lot of headaches off my plate to do it this way and makes it more possible for me to even address the project. Cool. Not as if there isn't already plenty to worry about with depth definition, AI and mission issues. In fact, with each type having its own terrain definition, the terrain itself can get a tag to define its liquid depth. Much easier.
 
Actually, this is perfect. It means that we still need coastal definitions on terrains and we just add a LOT more terrain types to coasts and oceans. That's actually quite helpful as it will mean there's not a huge mess of coding to attend to. So it means more work for xml defining and art and more work for adapting the mapscripts and there's still a lot of coding to do for the depth considerations and interactions, but it also means that we get to bypass a lot of coding that could inadvertently add a LOT of potential bugs.

So it may seem like more work but it takes a lot of headaches off my plate to do it this way and makes it more possible for me to even address the project. Cool. Not as if there isn't already plenty to worry about with depth definition, AI and mission issues. In fact, with each type having its own terrain definition, the terrain itself can get a tag to define its liquid depth. Much easier.
Yeah lets stick to the old way, I've already done most of the graphical legwork already trying to figure out the rules of terrain.

@Toffer,
So this explains why the Grid (if turned On) is missing now on ocean tiles. And a Mountain tile(s) next to the Ocean can have it's tile divided in 1/4 Grid lines.

I suppose I should post a screen shot, heh?

JosEPh
Oh I thought the texture file with a huge grid over it was an unnecessary file used only for fireaxis texture maker in specialized game engine software..... So I removed those textures. Guess I got to add them back again then. I think I know what you mean but a screen shot would be nice.
 
It means that we still need coastal definitions on terrains and we just add a LOT more terrain types to coasts and oceans.
There would be one advantage of having the coast and later sea (2 tiles out) defined by code. It would enable me to condense 9 continental shelf terrains into 3 continental shelf terrains.

From
Cont_Shelf_Coast_Trop/Polar/Temp
Cont_Shelf_Sea_Trop/Polar/Temp
Cont_Shelf_Ocean_Trop/Polar/Temp

Into just
Cont_Shelf_Trop/Polar/Temp.

This is the only coastal terrain that can extend further out than 1 tile from land due to it's unique top layer logic in that it can blend the same with both water and land without problem. Since it's shallow I could allow the visible seam outwards toward water terrains as seen in the picture.
 
There would be one advantage of having the coast and later sea (2 tiles out) defined by code. It would enable me to condense 9 continental shelf terrains into 3 continental shelf terrains.

From
Cont_Shelf_Coast_Trop/Polar/Temp
Cont_Shelf_Sea_Trop/Polar/Temp
Cont_Shelf_Ocean_Trop/Polar/Temp

Into just
Cont_Shelf_Trop/Polar/Temp.

This is the only coastal terrain that can extend further out than 1 tile from land due to it's unique top layer logic in that it can blend the same with both water and land without problem. Since it's shallow I could allow the visible seam outwards toward water terrains as seen in the picture.

True but there's a lot of potential unintended code consequences. It would be a much larger project to handle in code and could render the mod a bit buggy for a while. It should be avoided if we can.
 
@Joe, screen shot is no longer nescesarry, I saw the problem myself.

The grid textures have been re-introduced in the SVN.

Thanks Toffer. This :old: likes the Grid. :)

JosEPh
 
I finally figured out a system in which water terrain of all types can blend well together as well as with land terrain: 2015-09-30_00001.jpg

Now I just need to fine tune their coloration and give em better detail textures and perhaps optimize the alpha channel of some of the blend textures. :)

This might take a week or two though.

What I did was to separate the coast details out of the coastal blend textures and found an entirely new way to get the beach texture onto the land edge.



@Joe: Is there currently a graphical glitch with the grid system in the SVN that appeared after I brought back the missing grid-lines?

Edit: Example of tropical coast, polar coast blending nicely together, with the sea, and land.
2015-09-30_00002.jpg
 
Toffer, if you got spare time then look at Goody Island. There is not transparent beach/water texture in this model and for that Island look strange.
 
@Toffer,

Yes, see screenshots below.

The Grid lines blur and there is a weird dark blue track on coast and coast land.

JosEPh
 
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