When generating maps or loading heightmaps, the terrain height is altered to prevent slopes that can't be represented.
During this, there is now a chance of these tiles being turned into a rocky tile.
Chance of placing rocks is based on the height. This gives a rocky mountain appearance without affecting all peaks.
Most are very unlikely to ever be triggered in our codebase; two
stand out: linkgraph and money cheat. Those, potentially, could
wrap earlier than expected.
This opens up the true power of the TGP terrain generator, as it
is no longer constrainted by an arbitrary low map height limit,
especially for extreme terrain types.
In other words: on a 1kx1k map with "Alpinist" terrain type, the
map is now really hilly with default settings.
People can still manually limit the map height if they so wish,
and after the terrain generation the limit is stored in the
savegame as if the user set it.
Cheats still allow you to change this value.
This better reflects what it is, and hopefully removes a bit of
the confusion people are having what this setting actually does.
Additionally, update the text on the setting to better inform
users what it is doing exactly, so they can make an educated
decision on how to change it.
Next commit will introduce an "auto" value, which should be the
new default. The rename has as added benefit that everyone will
start out on the "auto" value.
This is an indication value; the game tries to get as close as it
can, but due to the complex tropic rules, that is unlikely to be
exact.
In the end, it picks a height-level to base the desert/tropic
line on. This is strictly seen not needed, as we can convert any
tile to either. But it is the simplest way to get started with
this without redoing all related functions.
Setting the snow coverage (in % of the map) makes a lot more sense
to the human, while still allowing the niche player to set (by
finding the correct %) a snow line height they like. This makes for
easier defaults, as it decoupled terrain height from amount of snow.
Maps can never be 100% snow, as we do not have sprites for coastal
tiles.
Internally, this calculates the best snow line height to approach
this coverage as close as possible.
Without hills, not all industries can be generated, which means
that with a default configuration you get errors. This is far from
optimal, of course.
This now forces that there is at least some hills, even when you
are using very-flat. This is a stopgap solution, but a proper
solution requires a full rewrite of the terrain generator, which
is not a 2 minute (or even 2 week) job.
To make sure flat is still flat-ish, reduce the default
snow-line-height to 10, making it look a lot better on smaller maps.
This is a compromise between being able to have flat maps and
still having all industries on arctic.
Jonathan G Rennison
Peter Nelson
SamuXarick
Rubidium
Patric Stout
frosch
Charles Pigott
glx22
S. D. Cloudt
Henry Wilson
Gabda
nikolas
alberth