haloterm wrote: ↑Mon Oct 05, 2020 6:27 pm
I'm currently switching back and forth between Basic Roads and Interesting Terrains (or actually I have both activated, so that I see at least the road network drawn on the travel map by Travel Options) and I really wish that one day both can work together ... because of this:
That's on the Isle of Balfiera.
This is ...
![Shocked :shock:](./images/smilies/icon_eek.gif)
Alpine paradise idyll. Even with cows.
I travelled a lot with Interesting Terrain now.
When thinking of compatibility with Basic Roads, this will surely provide some challenges. For example, I was just in Makilliweyn (Dragontail Mountains) -- with Interesting Terrain this city lies on top of the mountain and going there by foot feels quite natural, if one follows the terrain in a reasonable manner. It's quite exciting actually:
It is really giving a sense of greatness, of lonelyness, when you climb these naturally feeling mountain and then, finally, on top is this big city, like a guardian, a safe haven. So awesome.
However, I think that for such mountainous regions a different road network than currently created by users is needed. It needs to follow the natural slope of the terrain, otherwise some roads (like in this example) would go straight down in 80° or 90°... easiest way to do this is to simply NOT have roads in such regions, just some partial paths covering flatter grounds. Maybe one day two versions of the roads mod could be done. One for use with Distant Terrain and one without...
Roads compatibility will be my next project, now that Distant Terrain works. Indeed, it's going to be a challenge! I don't know when I'll reach a point where I'm satisfied with the terrain, and won't make further changes (it's probably gonna be sometime around v. 1.0). Therefore, it wouldn't be a great idea to create separate road networks for Interesting Terrains just yet. Also, I'm not exactly sure how the road patching works, but my impression is that only edge points for each map pixel is stored, and that the roads themselves are generated at runtime, which would make a sepparate set of road patches more or less irrelevant.
The ideal solution would be to procedurally generate roads that naturally follow the terrain slopes, but for now my plan is to smoothen the terrain around the existing road network much like how locations are smoothened. My philosophy behind terrain generation has always been that the terrain should conform to the existing heightmap and existing locations (and now also existing roads), not the other way around.
haloterm wrote: ↑Tue Oct 06, 2020 3:58 pm
Sorry for spamming this thread. Found a little bug:
This is in Wayrest region, near Joyous light of Akatosh.
No problem
I'm assuming that the area in the screenshot is close to a location. It's due to a limitation in the current version of the mod, as it still relies on the built-in location blending feature, which alters the terrain heights around locations AFTER I've textured the terrain. This will be fixed in the next version.
Nystul wrote: ↑Tue Oct 06, 2020 6:24 am
this looks amazing. thank you for your efforts!
I would not be too concerned. It is just how distant terrain looks (being one limitation of my mod). And since your mod generates more interesting terrain and more mountains in general it just happens more often that such transitions can be seen. Nothing to worry about
Looking forward to give this a try. No that is an understatement. Pretty hyped right now
Thanks
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
I'll post a demo of the fixed version sometime soon (still have a few things I'd like to implement before the next release), as I suppose you'd be the best person to evaluate how well the integration works.
Also, I have a potential idea on how to optimize Distant Terrain so that the transition ring can be created more smoothly; basically instead of generating them on the CPU, it should be possible to pass the main heightmap from the woods file to the terrain shader, and then achieve the transition by displacing the vertices in the vertex shader instead. It would work both with and without Interesting Terrains. If you're interested, I could play around with it a bit and share my results?
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)