[CF-Devel] speculations about the floor (elevation)

[crossfire-devel-admin at archives.real-time.com]

Tim Rightnour wrote:

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      I actually have an idea.. but it would require work on the java editor end.
     
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      First, if at all possible, the java editor should retain elevation when
     
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      replacing squares on a map.  Just keep the old elevation, nothing fancy.
     
     
  This obviously needs to be toggleable.  Eg, if your wiping out a bunch of 
spaces to replace by something different, you may really not want to keep the 
old elevation.

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      Second. the editor could possibly display the elevation in the square, like
     
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      have a tiny font "1000" in the upper corner of the square, so you can see at a
     
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      glance all the elevations.  I would assume one would want this to be toggleable.
     
     
  Would seem reasonable.

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      Third, if the editor had a elevation mode, where it simply displayed a color
     
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      gradient for the various elevations, say slowly rising to 10k being white, it
     
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      would make it easy to flip to elevation mode, and see the grade of the land.
     
     
Might be easier to just do simple color ranges than gradiants.  I'd presume 
there is no smoothing, eg, this is an alternate map display, where high squares 
are simply white, low squares are blue, and other squares have whatever color. 
Eg, don't try to smooth finer than a square, and even then, maybe just have a 
dozen colors that show elevation.

AV wrote:
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      Well, my concern about it is that this creates another menu,
     
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      another GUI - yet another feature that CF mapmakers need to
     
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      learn, understand and spend their time on.
     
     
  IMO, offering more tools is never a bad thing.  After all, the editor is 
really there to make things easier.  IMO, the best place for elevation 
information is in the object, so if we can make it easier to see that 
information in the editor, that is a good thing.

  the preserving elevation of a space is a bit of a hack.  One could certainly 
ask where does that lead (do we start preserving other values, etc).

  While one can certainly make the case that elevation data, and what it is used 
for, is not great, I think we have to acknowledge that elevation data is there. 
  And if we ignore the weather effects, and say do use it for line of sight, or 
something else interesting, it would be nice for the editor to support it.

  Perhaps the easiest, and least controversial of Tim's suggested bits would be 
the ability to have the elevation displayed on the tile.  That at least makes it 
easy to see what the elevation is, and what spaces are missing elevation.  One 
could load up an older version of the map (before the elevation is clobbered), 
and then see what they elevations are, what needs to be updated.

  The storing of elevation is quite a bit trickier, in that now you'd need to 
shadow those values someplace in the map (not in the object), and also deal with 
putting it back in when an object is added.  And you get trickiness in what 
happens if there are multiple objects on the space (do you add elevation to all 
of them?).  And thus all operations that make such updates need to be modified.




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