Mixup of Mountain & Steppe Biomes

[Daniel87]

Hi everyone,

I think I came across a bug here:
At the border of desert and mountain climate, some MapPixels use Mountain sky and groud texture while applying Steppe billboards.
My script currently only allows the placement of temperate and mountain billboards, but still there are desert billboards being displayed in the pattern of mountain vegetation. Maybe this is the way, how the transition between biomes in traditional Daggerfall was handled, maybe it's just a bug. I thought I better report it here, as it interferes with my mod.

Reproduction:
- Travel to Narjija in Santaki
- Up on the mountain range, you can see the faulty MapPixels being populated with Steppe Billboards while featuring Mountain Sky and Ground.
The billboards are being governed via mountain context in the code.

Standing on the Mountain MapPixel (mountain background, mountain flats, mountain ground texture)


Standing on the "Steppe" MapPixel (mountain background, desert flats, mountain ground texture)


Location (Narjija in Santaki)

[King of Worms]

Hi, I loaded the place you report about with my Dream mod enabled, to make sure the "steppes" 005 archive is used or not. And Im 99,9% certain its actually not, because if it was, it would manifest as a low res vanilla sprite (because I have not included that archive in Dream) - and I have not encountered any low res sprites there.

Not sure if this helped with anything - I never looked inside the terrain generation in depth as you did - but Im sure 005 archive is NOT used, thats all I can say to possibly add some light into this matter.

What I did notice was, than as I traversed from the desert region to the green region, I saw some desert sprites in that green region, which surprised me a bit. So maybe there really is some kind of biome transition? I had no idea about it.
Specifically Ive seen sprite number 503_3-0

You mention there are 2 kinds of desert, and thats TRUE
You have "pure" desert which is 503 sprite set
And than you have "sub tropic" which is a set 501

Subtropic is used at the regions where desert meets the ocean. That region uses desert ground, but there are lots of palm trees and flowers growing there.

Pure desert is more barren, with Cactus, dried trees and dry flowers and it uses the same ground texture as sub tropical.

So the groun texture is shared in between these 2 biomes.

Ill just add the climate map here, to ilustrate what I write about. But I know you are aware of that map anyway...

Spoiler!

Climate map.jpg (274.41 KiB) Viewed 1036 times

[Daniel87]

You are absolutely right and I think I should take a break from coding. I am seeing things where there are none.
I could swear I have seen a only-steppe sprite somehwhere in the desert. Haha, I'm a mess.

So is it supposed to be like this that the bordering MapPixels between mountains and desert are like a hybrid having the mountain texture and the mountain algorithms governing the sprite distribution but using the desert sprites? I thought it's a bug. If that's the case, I might have a problem now, as I carefully select which sprites from which biome are displayed in which situation.
This will not work anymore for these tiles and look quite messed up. Maybe I can try to think of something, but right now I have no idea how I could adjust the distribution algorithm for these special cases or even check if the neighbours are from a different climate. Does anyone know in what class the transitions between biomes are handled?



I deactiviated the textures for one desert and activated the other, then I did the same vice versa. It seems that both deserts use the same texture set. (see picture of DU code from MapsFile.cs)

Maybe one of the deserts was intended for the steppe but that was never included in the original game? I believe so, because texture set subtropical goes by its own name, only desert1 and desert2 are both defined as identical deserts that can be controlled by code independently. So it would be quite cool to have the steppe for desert 1 or 2 instead, that would increase variety through original content of the game

[King of Worms]

I think desert 1 and desert 2 are the two deserts at the bottom of map. Ingame they are same. Just count em as 1...

Maybe forget unused 005 set for a while?

And maybe forget biome transitions. Most likely they are non existant.

[Daniel87]

Yes you are right, I ignored them and instead focused on ITerrainTexture to generate rare water ponds in deserts with Oasis around
Now we need vultures! Hehe.

So now the desert really IS a desert.

[l3lessed]

Those types of additions are dope. You could then add a chance for NPCs to appear at the oasis or a random quest or dead corpses from stranded travelers, and yes birds of some type to help identify and signal oasis from a distance. Thanks for giving daggerfalls nature so much extra life and feel.

[King of Worms]

Not sure that totally empty desert is something I will enjoy tho

[Ralzar]

Not sure that totally empty desert is something I will enjoy tho

Was kinda thinking the same. Too bad there sin't a set of desert nature sprites that's just different rock formations. Just empty desert kinda makes it obvious that it's a 3D flat.

[Daniel87]

I took King of Worms remark to heart and changed the Desert 1 already. He was absolutely right - It feels much better now.
Attached are some screenshots:

[Daniel87]

Solved the terrain billboards that will be loaded for each terrain and will do a PR now.

Before: New terrain loads billboards of the climate from the terrain on which the player currently stands.
Now: Terrain loads billboards of its own assigned climate.