[Mikey Lubker]

Terrain blending (50% alpha) would be a great feature
to add once we've gotten objects basically working.

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A few miscellaneous thoughts on this before I forget them:

1. I don't think the 50% alpha thing would be too difficult to
do. The only quasi-weird aspect of is that the terrain
textures would have to extend into adjacent vertices' space.
That is, we current render the terrain for vertex (x,y) in a
square region bounded by (x-0.5, y-0.5) and (x+0.5, y+0.5).
In order to make the 50% alpha work, we would need to
shrink the current square by some amount (say 0.1), then
add an additional band of twice that size around the
perimeter.

2. There are some types of terrain (e.g. water/land
boundary, sandtrap on a golf course, etc.) where this type of
blending is UNdesireable. Should we have a way to suppress
it?

3. It would be more natural looking if the alpha levels
gradually decreased rather than going from 100% -> 50% ->
0%. Not sure how easy this would be with our current
backend renderers.

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Answering your questions...

1. OK - will talk to graphics people about this

2. Yes maybe a <blend> tag?

3. Hmm... maybe work toward it? ;)

Thanks
Ratchet

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The blending you mention is a tricky issue.

How many kinds of blends should there be ?
Think about it... sand and pebbles can blend smoothy, but
for other textures,
It depends alot on what tile is joining with what other tile.
For example, underbrush should look a bit spiky when laid
"atop/adjacent to" water,
but adjacent to lava, it'd have a very very different look
indeed.
Likewise, pebbles adjoining water would have a very definite
look (more and more sparse but clearly defined pebbles),
but adjacent to underbrush, the underbrush should be dominant.
So, it's a tricky question of just how many types of
adjoining map-tiles you want ??

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Maybe we could support 3 different kinds of blending:

1. No overlap, abtrupt transitions (what we have now).
2. Overlap where neither texture is fully opaque.
3. Custom bitmap for the overlap.

We pick either 1 or 2 as the default; provide the ability
for the user to specify the other (2 or 1) for certain pairs
of terrains; and provide the ability for the user to specify
other pairs of terrains where 3 should be used (and supply
the corresponding transition bitmaps).

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The 3-type blending idea sounds good.

Perhaps:

<blend 1> (no overlap)
<blend 2 texture1alpha=50 texture2alpha=50> (alpha style)
<blend 3 specialtexture="filename.png"> (special texture style)

could be tags?

Thanks
Ratchet

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I have exp. in doing 100%/0%-clarity images, but no
experience in creating semi-opaque images, so my work's
likely to be a bit junky in that direction.
Who else do we have on this part of the project ?

Does GOal have the ability to rotate tile-images easily ?
If so, then the needed tiles would be reduced to
1) center tile (solid)
2) vertically split tile
3) horizontally split tile
4) diagonally split tile
5) center-side to center-top split tile

As I imagine it, each background tile has a HEIGHT. Water
would be the lowest, then gravel, stone, underbrush, and
finally lava and manmade objects.
GOal can take into account the relative height of
overlapping areas, and choose the higher map-tile's overlay.
This would mean 100%/0%-clarity edges, based around the
shapes of the higher image (round pebble, crested sand
dune, etc.). That image could be placed atop a normal
"lower" map tile to create the proper intersection.

Whaddaya think ?.

• assigned_to: nobody --> zenscient

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Mike: please look at latest followup from Seth.

Thanks
Ratchet

• priority: 5 --> 8

• summary: Terrain Blending --> Terrain

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Animated terrains (MNG) would also be nice to have.

Also, fixup as shown in the followups should be implemented.