Universal Forum Archive

In the clients texture folder (under land) there are pictures called Gentex.

Gentex01 to gentex 64

01 through 61 are pieces of the over all map of T'muiria (my world) 64 is an image of the whole world - without water each of the textures are shown, which results in the elevations of my planet being shown.

I figure it has to do with the planet's textures - if I modify those pictures say "draw" streets will that show up on my map? Or will modifying those "break" my planet meaning lead to issues?

Mit might want to correct me, but as far as I know, the answer's yes... and no. What follows may be obvious to you, or totally confusing, but here goes anyway.

First off, you've got three basic ways of texturing your landscape (this is slightly simplifed, but bear with me):

- you can use surface tiles, such as your "main surface" - a single image tiled over the whole world - plus other surfaces you can lay in certain areas for roads and so on.

- you can use texmaps: these are texture files you can stretch over an area of tiles (or the whole world, if you want)

- you can use the automatic texture generator. This takes some input textures (assigned in the world server) and puts them on the landscape according to the heights you set in landscape settings.

Now - the gentex files you describe are, I think, files generated by the automatic texture generator. But (again, I think) they aren't files associated with your world in the way you mean. I think it just uses that folder to store them or something. The automatic system is sort of dynamic or real-time - it renders the textures every time you run the world, so I don't think it uses the stored ones. Again, big "mit needs to confirm this" disclaimer. you could always test the theory by saving a copy of one and drawing on it, see what happens. You won't break anything and can just replace the original if you do.

Anyway... you can do what you describe if you want - draw streets etc on top of the existing landscape - in a number of ways.

1 - using surfaces. Use a single grass texture or something for your main surface, find or make some road textures that tile, and lay 'em on the landscape. Nice and easy, and you can assign properties to the surfaces (hard or easy to drive on, for example). Can look a bit tiled and crap though.

2 - using texmaps. In theory you could also make some big street texmaps and stick em on the landscape too. Still quite easy, but you don't get the properties control. You can, however, add surfaces to texmaps, and change the way they blend in.

3. Using the autogen system and an awful lot of work...

First you need to set up the auto texture gen system to make the landscape you want. You can also use the main surface texture with autogen.

Next you need to use the command .savegentex, which pops up a window that'll let you save out the entire landscape as a bunch of tiles - basically it chops the landscape into 16 and saves each file as a separate texmap. Including the main surface texture blend. Only works with bitmaps at the moment, and you'll need to play with the output settings to get the result you want.

Then, in theory, you can edit those files to add any details you want.

Next step - assign those 16 texmaps to the slots in the world server.

Finally, you can use the command .autotexmap 16 to put all 16 texmaps onto your world automatically.

Disadvantages - you don't get the properties control. Advantages: you can make it look really nice, and - if you're cunning - you can use the results to go back to approach #2 - using texmaps - then add surfaces to them as well.

Actually, if you're truly cunning, you could make all roads the same height on your landscape and use the autogen system to texture them all with a tarmac texture or something. Lots of options.


All of the above depends on the various Landscape Settings in the settings menu - success will depend on lots of things, like whether you're using autogen textures (they don't work with texmaps.. I think); what blend mode you're using (play with them and you'll see how the main surface/autogen/secondary surfaces look different); what landscape rendering mode you're using (10 and above: main surface texture is stretched over the whole landscape; below 10, various tiled blends are used I think)

The whole texmap/autogen/surfaces thing needs documenting properly. I was going to do it at the end of last year but mit told me not to bother, cos he's going to rewrite it. Anyway if you have any questions reply here, I've been messing with this stuff a lot recently so I'll help if I can. I'm sure I've got a lot of the above wrong, but see how you go...

f

Alrighty then.

Thanx

The automatic system is sort of dynamic or real-time - it renders the textures every time you run the world, so I don't think it uses the stored ones. Again, big "mit needs to confirm this" disclaimer.

Indeed, that is correct.

Heres a snap of the experiments i did with the .savegentex system btw.. Tho it took a bit of fiddling around with the images, it took less than an hour to texture the entire landscape and make it look fairly neat.

So saving gentex (gives me options on size there) I have 16 bitmaps, all of them appear to be backward to my grayscale map BTW. I have 5 textures – deep water is blue, shorelines are sand, then a dark grass for lower elevations, a medium grass for mid elevations and a “rocky/grassy” texture for mountain peaks.

What I am getting from the gentex option is that I could use autotextures to change the rocky/grassy to rock, then through cropping at a level where my medium grass is not blended, I could move the new texture (rock) over one specific hill top and have my rocky/grassy texture on one hill and my rock texture on another.


Or with roads, I could “draw” out near white (very high elevation) roads on a copy of my grayscale map, texture that as concrete with autotexturing, save a gentex, revert back to the original grayscale (without the roads drawn in) load up the 16 gentexs and my roads will be there?


Since I am using up my tex maps (0-15) for this then I have to scrap my airport? Or do I just put my airport ground texture onto the gentex?

As an aside, how does one "smooth" the landscape?

I note on Zion that the grayscale map near white "hill" is cut suddenly with a circular "plain" yet on the world the hill is not ragged (as the grayscale map) but is smooth.

Which option is the "smoothing" option in the settings?

Using the smoothing settings in the world server's terrain editor. You can smooth bits of landscape at different heights, different amounts - although mit's heightmap is pretty smooth anyway, so I'm not sure if he's using it there on zion.

Anyway, see here for more info...

f

Fooli wrote:Using the smoothing settings in the world server's terrain editor. You can smooth bits of landscape at different heights, different amounts - although mit's heightmap is pretty smooth anyway, so I'm not sure if he's using it there on zion.

Anyway, see here for more info...

f

Shame on me, I assumed that that was part of the terrain generator, not as something usable with grayscale maps.

Thanx

Oh wait, due to my settings (although I changed font size to normal) my editor is still missing its bottom and right side - I can not change the smoothing.

DvdGStwrt wrote:So saving gentex (gives me options on size there) I have 16 bitmaps, all of them appear to be backward to my grayscale map BTW.

They do come out backwards. In my experience, if you look at your heightmap as a 4x4 grid, then you'd expect texmap 0 to be top left, moving across to texmap 3 top right, then 4 to 7 on the next row, 8 to 11 on the third row, and 12-15 on the bottom. You'd expect that, yes. But nooo, what you get is slightly backwards. In fact, the numbers are the same for each row (0-3, 4-7, 8-11, 12-15) but their direction is reversed:

3 - 2 - 1 - 0
7 - 6 - 5 - 4
11-10-9 - 8
15-14-13-12

You can either rename them or just assign them correctly in the server's texmap slots.

DvdGStwrt wrote:What I am getting from the gentex option is that I could use autotextures to change the rocky/grassy to rock, then through cropping at a level where my medium grass is not blended, I could move the new texture (rock) over one specific hill top and have my rocky/grassy texture on one hill and my rock texture on another.

Yes. Leading on to...

DvdGStwrt wrote:Or with roads, I could “draw” out near white (very high elevation) roads on a copy of my grayscale map, texture that as concrete with autotexturing, save a gentex, revert back to the original grayscale (without the roads drawn in) load up the 16 gentexs and my roads will be there?

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing you can do. It takes a bit of fiddling with but this is a viable way to texture the landscape: create your "proper" heightmap, and work out what sorta features you want, where. Then create a "texture" heightmap which reflects the texture varieties you want in terms of height (ie, by making all your roads really high, by making the airport bit a certain height, etc). Then run the autogen system, see if you like it... if you do, save out the texmaps, then revert to the proper heightmap and apply the texmaps to it.

You tend to get a bit of smearing if you have extreme heights on your "texture" heightmap - if your roads are on top of a huge cliff wall, sorta thing, then all that landscape leading up to the road on the high version will get squished into a tiny line of texture on the proper one. But it's worth playing with.

As for the airport - you could still add it afterwards using surfaces; or - very time consuming - you could in theory paste all of your 16 texmaps into a single huge image, edit it directly, then chop it up again and save back to your world directory...


As for your weird display issue: first we've heard of it as far as game tools are concerned. You get problems with any other programs? Up to date with drivers etc?
f

So how large of a tex map can I have? IF I has one streched out over the whole map how draining on other computers would that be? I know when I go to a new world there is a longish period of time to upload models, graphics, blah. I would hate to have somebody with a modum connection having to wait four hours in order to see everything.

As for graphics, everything is up to date. Even went to my computer manufacturer this past week to update/upgrade/patch in order to "fix" things for the game. As far as I know no other games are giving me issues. I take that back. Sim City 4 crashes due to a "graphics error" it has been doing that since we updated the Nivida in November/December of '05 so the kids could play Toontown.

However I was having other issues with that game due to mods, plug-in models, additions that were added to the game and I assume that most of the problem is that I have exceeded the minimal limitations with that game. That would need more RAM in order to deal with, one of those things on the list of To Do.

This weekend I am going to be at the parents who have a newer (bought 3 months ago) XP system. I'll upload the programs there and see what that looks like there, then check their settings against mine - in the graphics area.

Most likely it is something really small that I am over looking.

The Nivida is something I just don't play with, as far as I know it is "turned off" (desktop enhancements) at least it is supposed to be "off"

DvdGStwrt wrote:So how large of a tex map can I have? IF I has one streched out over the whole map how draining on other computers would that be? I know when I go to a new world there is a longish period of time to upload models, graphics, blah. I would hate to have somebody with a modum connection having to wait four hours in order to see everything.

How long is a piece of string.... or more accurately, how much video RAM do you have (or your prospective players); how long are you prepared for people to wait downloading graphics for the first time; and how much detail do you really need for the purpose of your gameworld/landscape size/camera settings etc. You could use a massive 128Mb texture across the whole landscape, but you'd constantly be swapping data into and out of the video card to cope with everything else. It's all a compromise somewhere.

I've successfully used a 4096x4096 texmap stretched over an entire world. Even with the landscape scale at its lowest settings (ie so the world was as small as possible) it looked a bit crap. I've also used 16 2048x2048 bitmaps - giving a "whole world" resolution of 8192x8192, and even that looked a bit dodgy in places. I can't try anything bigger cos I don't have enough RAM to generate the textures in the first place :)

In the end it probably doesn't matter (assuming you're not trying for photographic quality or something) as long as you can live with the quality, and don't make people wait for ever when they download stuff. 16x 1024x1024 jpg texmaps is something like 6mb of textures, which is probably a couple of minutes waiting for someone on an entry level adsl connection. And if you make it clear that they need to wait a bit (eg on the splashscreen), or provide offline ways to get the content... it all gets easier.

Btw, you'll probably want to put your world's content on a webserver if possible - otherwise you'll eat up your entire internet connection when more than a couple of people start downloading from you..

Finally.. the whole point of multi-layered textures (eg having a main surface plus texmaps, or autogen plus secondary surfaces) is to ease some of these pressures. Use one layer to do detail, and another to do colour. Eg, use autogen to set up the basic landscape features and add surface tiles to do detail like roads; or use the main surface to provide colour and texmaps to add detail..

f

One other approach you might like to investigate is using a little (free) program called T2 (http://www.toymaker.info/html/texgen.html).

It basically does the same as the game's autogen system only it gives you a lot more control. I actually find the additonal control more confusing than anything - it's much harder to blend levels of texture together with T2, but when it gets it right it's quite nice. The main benefit of T2, however, is multiple height maps. You can use it to overlay roads and other features onto an existing heightmap, make them follow the terrain, and use their own texture(s).

f

Neat.

I'll give it a closer look see.