{"id":30,"date":"2006-05-26T02:40:43","date_gmt":"2006-05-26T02:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world-machine.com\/blog\/?p=30"},"modified":"2006-05-26T02:40:43","modified_gmt":"2006-05-26T02:40:43","slug":"terrain-types-and-macros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/terrain-types-and-macros\/","title":{"rendered":"Terrain Types and Macros"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s been some talk lately on the forums about creating a library of terrain types in the form of macros.<\/p>\n<p>This is something that I&#8217;ve wanted for a long time; I think it would be immensely useful to have a standard set of macros that can help move things upwards one large level of abstraction when putting together a terrain. There are really three things you need to be able to do:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Specify the distribution of the terrain types where you want them<\/li>\n<li>Transition from one type of terrain to another in a manner that looks proper; this is a much more difficult problem than you might expect.<\/li>\n<li>Have each terrain type macro produce a realistic non-geographically-specific output for its type ie that macro alone will produce endless mountains or dunes or what have you with no large scale variations.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>How do these pieces fit together?<\/p>\n<p>The first point is something that will probably be much easier in WM Pro. Right now, you can procedurally control the large-scale location of things, or import a bitmap that has your own placement map in it. But there&#8217;s no easy way to go from the single greyscale map to a terrain type mapping. Some modifications to the Height Splitter device would provide an easy way to dice up a single placement map into individual bands of coverage strength that seamlessly mesh.<\/p>\n<p>The second point is really quite difficult. A naive blending scheme between terrain types just doesn&#8217;t look very good. There are various degrees of hacks possible on this subject though; more musings on that later.<\/p>\n<p>The third point is not that hard: It&#8217;s just the magnitude of the task of creating good macros for each geological terrain type.<br \/>\nIs there any interest in forming a &#8220;task force&#8221; for the creation of this type of terrain macro package? If so, I would be willing to open up a new subforum on the WM forums for discussion of all of all things related to this task. The goal woul d be the eventual creation of a WM Terrain Type library that could be &#8220;bolted together&#8221; with some possibly new devices to produce realistic terrain without having to do extreme amounts of network wizardry; this could even tie into the Wizard system that was mentioned as a possibility earlier.<\/p>\n<p>What do you guys think? Any interest in participating in such a thing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s been some talk lately on the forums about creating a library of terrain types in the form of macros. This is something that I&#8217;ve wanted for a long time; I think it would be immensely useful to have a standard set of macros that can help move things upwards one large level of abstraction [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"publish_to_discourse":"","publish_post_category":"","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}