[CF-Devel] World Maps Redux

[Scott MacFiggen]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 10:36:45PM -0800, Mark Wedel wrote:
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       Something ideas I've had:
     
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      1) Make the game a little less blocky - do this by putting some curved 
     
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      type objects for things like trees, roads, etc,  I'm really not sure how 
     
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      useful this will be unless there are a lot of different curved type pieces.  
     
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      This is purely cosmetic change.  Related here would be to make some 'edge' 
     
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      cases for the forest - ie, at the edge, you would see the tree trunks.
     
     
I was actually considering taking this problem on for my next project. There
are some good articles on gamedev.net that go over ways to implement this.
The one I was going to try was adding a fringe layer to the maps. 
Although the biggest problem with this is it breaks the new map command since
there are not enough bits left to add another map layer. Anyway the basic
idea is you have terrain precedences and a fringe bitmap for each 
terrain border. So to take an example from the article, if you had
a forest and a grassland border, the forest would have precedence
over the grassland and stick out a bit into the grassland tile. 

It is a short article, URL is 
     
     http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article943.asp
     
      

And I agree with all of your other comments.

 -Scott