Terrain and Improvements

[slugwalk]

I was wondering, is there a gameplay reason why forests aren't allowed on ridges? In terms of reality, forests are often found at relatively high elevations here on Earth. Scientifically speaking, the only elevations that prevent tree growth would also prevent productive farming.
On a related topic, I also would argue that moisture condensers don't make much sense working on ridges. High elevations already cause most of the moisture in air to condense out, so there wouldn't be much more possible.

 

[Maniac]

I was wondering, is there a gameplay reason why forests aren't allowed on ridges?

No.

...



The reason is graphical in nature. Features don't adjust to terrain height on my computer, so forest and hybrid forest on ridges would look awful. If you begged Lord Tirian to create a forest and hybrid forest nif that adapted to height similar to how fungus can now do, I could allow forest on ridges.

Considering this issue isn't all that big and such a nif might only benefit me, I didn't want to bother Lord Tirian with this.

On a related topic, I also would argue that moisture condensers don't make much sense working on ridges. High elevations already cause most of the moisture in air to condense out, so there wouldn't be much more possible.

I'd say the rules and restrictions for building terrain improvements are already complex enough, so I'm not gonna do this unless it would improve gameplay.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Considering this issue isn't all that big and such a nif might only benefit me, I didn't want to bother Lord Tirian with this.

I took a look at it... and I'm not very happy with the results:

The resulting nif would suffer from rather ugly distortions - it's okay for flat things like fungus, but trees are rather vertical *and* have branches. Especially on ridges, this can lead to rather weird looking results (like crowns stretching lower than the trunk...)

Furthermore, as with the fungus, these nifs wouldn't work with the normal tree tiling, so you'd need to use a single full plot nif for every plot, meaning the trees would stop avoiding resources/features/routes/rivers (just like the low gfx fungus is implemented).

I don't know how your forests are looking now, but it's very possible that it's looking worse than before. A way around that might be making special ridge forests/hybrid forests, so you can keep the normal forest graphics around (well, on ridges you'd probably only get conifers anyway... so it wouldn't be too much fiddling, I guess...)

In any case, if you want these nifs, tell me and I'm making them for all forest variants (leafy, conifers, snow-covered, hybrid).

Cheers, LT.

 

[Maniac]

I've attached how forest on highlands look with me right now. No problem usually, though it can look annoying when highland is next to water. Then it can look like the forest is covering the water.

Anyway, I guess such nifs might look good on highlands, but not on ridges. So probably not worth spending time on.