Wilderness Overhaul

[Daniel87]

Thank you my friend

Since I am living abroad in Taiwan, I have tons of free time at my hands (Germany is a working slave hellhole with lock down right now, while in Taiwan everything is as usual and living expenses are cheap). So I am working full time on this mod right now until I have passion for my other Unity game projects again ^^

Will do some smoll job now and then hopefully get back to my beloved mod. Tonight I plan on refactoring the code. I created quite some spaghetti code yesterday that needs urgent refactoring. The whole file is already 2000+ lines of repetitive code that can be soved in 1000 or less I guess.

[Daniel87]

Very impressive progress!

I wonder, given there are not many places with water in the desert I guess (?) - if the decision to make the desert so barren is good. Because it will maybe mean you will just travel thru empty space 99% of time. Yes it might be realistic, but Id personally have the desert interesting in a way it was PLUS have the nice oasis places scattered around as a bonus.

The nice solution to this might be the following:

I can imagine this barren desert you have now to be succesfully used in the lowest (white) part of the desert. I know that Climates & Calories mod distinguish between these 2 types of deserts, so it might be possible for you to do the same? That would be actually really good and add to the diversity and variety of the game!

So as you travel far from the ocean you have
1) Sub tropic - sandy ground with lots of palmtrees and flowers
2) Desert 1 - original kind of desert with added oasis from you
3) Desert 2 - Hell... just sand and oasis

Climates images:

Spoiler!

49-1581664533-1073213764.png
49-1575491231-300419793.png

It's not completely empty as there are sometimes random generated cactus+flower spots, plant+cactus+flower spots, Oasis without water and less dense, flower areas and dead trees and rocks/stones. But they are not that dense as in other climates to make sense
Of course the amount of different plants in each MapPixel is also randomized. Some areas have more of these random plants, others are more empty.

Good to know that climate and calories distinguishes them, then I will increase the frequency of plants and oasis for Desert 1 now

[King of Worms]

Seems like you know what you are doing, thanks for update

Also, Ive noticed you asked about terrain generation.. there are 4 mods which deal with terrain generation currently:

Distant terrain
https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/128
http://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic. ... e5ceee6f26

Interresting terains
https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/115

Enhanced and Eroded terrains
https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/166
http://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic. ... e5ceee6f26

and Mountains and Hills
http://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic. ... e5ceee6f26

I think Interresting terains looks the best but it needs some improvements as it removed some lakes.

Anyway, if you need some info about this matter, ppl who created the mods might be of help. But if I were you, I would not spread too much and focus on one thing.

Good luck, have fun and thanks for your work!

[Daniel87]

Thank you for the mod list!
I will check them out one by one and think if it is worth to make my own one or use one of theirs in combination.

Thanks to your advice, I reworked the chances for forest and oasis spawn in Desert1 to reflect the intermediate desert between full desert and subtropical landscapes. I am quite satisfied with the result now. For people playing with Survival mods, the full desert will be a cool challenge

Here some screenshots for you:

Spoiler!

[Nystul]

I like your work a lot!

[Daniel87]

Thank you

[Zonk]

Wow, the progress you've been making in the last few days is amazing! I'm especially hoping this will be eventually compatible with Interesting Terrains, the combination with this would make the wilderness feel a million times more realistic.

[Daniel87]

I will try to develop it with this in mind but can't promise anything.
The most apparent problem with mods changing the heightmap will be that oasis in the desert might spawn at slopes, which is immersion breaking.
Still trying to find a solution. Plan is to create a function that gets me local minimum heights (small valleys) and only spawns water tiles there.
But had no time yet to properly look into terrain generation. Only the texturing and placing of billboards so far.

[Daniel87]

Daily Update:

Today I finished the haunted woodland climate, but am not really satisfied nor happy with it.
It is by far the worst texture set I came across so far (fingers crossed I won't encounter another one like it) as it features only two trees with leaves and one of them is scaled too small. So you can imagine how a "dense" forest with only one kind of tree sprite would look - not that great, I assure you.
I tried my best nevertheless and will leave it as it is for now, as the biome covers such a small part of the whole world map, it's not worth sinking more time into it in my opinion.

As always, here some screenshots to get an idea of what I'm talking about:

Spoiler!

Stay safe and have a good time guys!

[King of Worms]

I kind of like it, its barren... still much better than the generic grid based distribution of vanilla. You do a really good job with this mod, it will affect whole game so the impact will be strong! Really glad you picked up this endeavor, thank you for the work you put in. I hope the PR you posted on git gets thru, but Im sure Interkarma will take a good look at it and give you the necessary feedback in case if anything needs to be further altered.