Bodies of water and other terrain

[Miloch]

I really feel like we need more bodies of water in game. New Hampshire is a fairly wet state as far as bodies of water goes. I love the view from a mountain top (I like hiking) looking out and seeing all the lakes and what not. So I’ll give a list of some ideas for new terrain.

LAKE: Multi-tile fresh body of water. This of course would not be able to have basically any existing terrain in it.
Thoughts: New source of water. Some place to drive those boats around that is a decent size. Will probably need a bunch of new stuff to put in adjacent tiles. Houses that are specific to lakes. Docks. Public Docks. Parks near the lake that would be different then normal parks. But you could just add the lakes at first.

POND: This is generally a smaller then one tile body of water that would not be visible on the overmap. It should spawn kinda like minefields and lava and not exactly map to a specific tiles. (I’ve noticed these two things can overlap tiles somewhat.)

RIVER: This should start/end at a lake (or the non-existent ocean). Would need one tile bridges for them, but they should be too hard to make. Rivers should overrides buildings in cities.

STREAM: Smaller then a river, and shouldn’t be as long. Should begin at a pond and end at a river or lake. Streams that intersect cities should have a grate that leads into the sewers.

HILLS: Terrain that is less suitable for having buildings. Should be considered difficult terrain (it’s hard to walk up or down a steep hill.). Should have flat places and terrain that is obviously steep. This would be a good hack until we get z levels.

Random thoughts:
Simulated water flow (being in water pushes you slowly?)

Will post more later.

[i2amroy]

Definitely a +1 from me on everything but the hacky hills, we just need someone to actually go in and mess with the world generation code to get them to generate.

[pisskop]

If I knew how Id have my mountains and oceans. Id only generate ‘New England’ areas, with caost to the south and east and mountains/plains to the north and west.

[Miloch]

For the hills my thoughts are about New England is a pretty mountainous and hilly region. We really need more of that to make it feel right.

[pisskop]

NE is about small hills, slightly larger mountainy things, cool damp areas, and vast forests. We have rivers and valleys and most farm land and fields were man-made, so without man to maintain them the land should begin reverting back imo.

It percipitates in spurts and randomly, acting like a little London. We have storms refered to as Noreasters and we get sudden ice storms that drop little snow but freeze power lines solid in ice. Last winter it snowed 3 times outside of Febuary, where it snowed for 65% of the days.

In the summer we get heat waves and cool waves, rain for most a week and then nothing for a month.

[Miloch]

I’m from New Hampshire myself. Born in Concord Hospital. And no, you probably aren’t saying it right. It’s pronounced con-cerd. Why? You expect me to know?
You should also have the occasional huge tree in various areas. These would be old growth trees. New England was the next best thing to clear cut back in the colonial days. But there are the occasional old growth tree that you can’t put your arms around. They aren’t really that uncommon. In a forest I’d say about one every four map tiles or so. Could represent them as four tile trees. They are huge and MUCH bigger then other, newer trees. On the property my mother owns in New Hampshire we have about two or three (they may have cut one down) old growth trees. It’s only a quarter acre plot. But the house itself is over 100 years old. It’s the proverbial old rambling farm house. (Yes, the main supports of the structure are hand hewn.)

[i2amroy]

For the hills my thoughts are about New England is a pretty mountainous and hilly region. We really need more of that to make it feel right.

It’s not the hills I have a problem with, it’s the “hack” part of it.

[Miloch]

Well I’m calling it a hack…
But I mean really it’s a low effort way of doing things. It’s not something we want to put lots of effort into as we have people putting effort into z levels which would replace it. So… I guess you still don’t like this even if I don’t call it a hack anymore?