Re: [Freecol-graphics] [Freecol-developers] Off-center rivers

[Michael V. <Mic...@gm...>]

On 04/15/2014 12:34 PM, Michael T. Pope wrote:
> On Sun, 06 Apr 2014 15:38:48 +0200
> Michael Vehrs <Mic...@gm...> wrote:
>> The rivers have been moved off-center. Rivers and forests have been
>> auto-generated. If you consider the approach worthwhile, I will improve
>> the rivers.
> I can confirm the movement of the rivers and forest clearance is working,
> which is encouraging.  Its worth moving forward IMHO, although I remain a
> bit cautious until we see the final result.  One problem that does seem to
> have resurfaced is the sticking-out-corner problem, visible at the bottom
> of the desert tile in the attachment.

Was that ever fixed? I can't recall that happening. As far as I 
remember, this is a pretty fundamental problem of our map painting 
algorithm, which became a lot more visible when I replaced the opaque 
tile borders with transparent ones.

In your screenshot, the desert beach is painted after the savannah beach 
to its left, and does not take the type of the tiles it touches at the 
corners into account. The problem here is that if we add a transparent 
border at the corner, then several such borders will sometimes add up to 
a pretty dark spot.

>
>> It might also be a good time to generate multiple versions
>> of the forest tiles, and possibly also of the river tiles.
> Agreed, and possibly to harmonize with the existing alternate-tile
> hackery used for mountains.
>
> Cheers,
> Mike Pope


That should probably wait until after the next release. I see a few 
problems to be solved. In principle, the tile style information should 
not go into the model, since it really only concerns the GUI. However, 
we save no persistent GUI information, yet. We also need to take into 
account that the number of available styles might vary from player to 
player and from time to time, depending on available mods, for example. 
Thus, it might be a good idea to map the tile id, or some combination of 
id and coordinates on the number of available tiles, e.g.

   id.hashCode() % number_of_styles

On the other hand, we need to determine the styles when the map is first 
displayed, which might be some work, especially if we decide to use 
multi-tile images, or images that depend on the style of neighbouring 
tiles. And some styles might have additional constraints, such as ice 
floes that should not be used in the tropics.


Regards

Michael