Creating different coast terrain types

[Leoreth]

I am currently trying to include a new type of Coast into my mod that provides less food than regular Coast (i.e. 2 instead of 12) to represent polar regions of the map where cities are supposed to be less populated.

Game mechanics wise that worked without problems, but I also wanted to visually distinguish the new terrain type from regular Coast so I increased the brightness of the original texture. Unfortunately, the game does not seem to be able to render the border between the two types of coast as expected, and instead simply creates straight borders between them:

Spoiler :

The only thing I did was take the CoastBlend.dds and CoastGrid.dds textures and increase their brightness with GIMP. Is there anything else I can do to create a smooth transition between the two types, similar to how it works for land terrain? Is there anything I forgot to do?

 

[Jules Auburn]

When you added your new terrain, did you give it a unique LayerOrder in CIV4ArtDefines_Terrain.xml? If you didn't, it seems that the game doesn't know how to blend the textures, so you get hard borders:

Spoiler <LayerOrder>50</LayerOrder> :

Unfortunately, changing the layer order produces a different problem--the coast blends into the new terrain as if it is land:

Spoiler <LayerOrder>45</LayerOrder> :

Setting the LayerOrder to 55 (between Coast and Ocean) or 65 (beneath the Ocean) produces similar results.
I also tried tinkering with: the alpha channel of the new terrain, other layer orders, and with the land part of the new texture. Nothing that I tried blended the textures properly.

I decided to search the forums to see if anyone else had this issue. As it turns out, that is the case:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/adding-another-water-terrain.490392/
However, they didn't have any solutions either.

IMHO, the hard border looks better, as long as it is kept straight. You might have better luck tinkering with it, though.

 

[Leoreth]

Thanks for looking into it. It seems like the game isn't really designed to have multiple types of coast terrain that have a defined blend with each other as well as ocean and land terrain. Looks like I need to settle for the same texture for the new terrain.

 

[Jarlaxe Baenre]

What about creating additional terrains that are just the blend you want, and placing them at the borders? A bit of a messy solution, but it should work fine graphically, since there's no actual blending going on in the game engine.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Caveman2Cosmos has multiple coastal, sea and ocean types. I think some work was done on them to make them blend. I can't remember if it was Toffer90 or Sparth who did the work. Toffer90 did do the freshwater lakes and Sparth has been away for awhile.

 

[Leoreth]

Interesting, may be worth looking into at some point.