Leaderboard

Love that use of the greenhouse roofs. Very cool!

You have hit on something modders have been thinking about for many years, and actually something I personally have been thinking about very recently. For a long time, I've really wanted a similar water texture to what you describe, and I was recently experimenting with the limits of what we know about the game terrain. So far, it has not been cracked in 25 years. The game handles the terrain textures in a complex way. People experimenting with it have figured out how to change the graphics for the terrain blending edges (the part that blends between different terrain when you have terrain blending on), it turns out that's actually somewhat straightforward. ^ An example of me experimenting recently with new placeholder textures for the fresh and saltwater terrain edges. This just involves replacing a couple of .tga images in the game's terrain.ztd file. But it behaves in a non-intuitive way, and it's limited only to certain tiles that blend with what's next to them. When you put more of the same terrain down, it reverts to its standard terrain texture, which is handled by a different part of the game's code. This makes it not really very useful for any modding. So far, none of us have found a way to make sense of the game's internal content in a way that lets us work with the terrain textures directly. We know where the relevant file folders are, but there are many thousands of files associated with each terrain and we don't know what many of them do or how to edit them. It's possible this may one day be solved, but currently the mod you (and I) are looking for isn't possible yet. There is a team currently working on decoding and rewriting/re-implementing ZT1's entire source code as part of a project called OpenZT, like the OpenRCT2 project has done for Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. There is quite a long path ahead of them, but this is a good example of the kind of modding of core game elements that could be enabled with the potential new engine. So, perhaps that's something to look forward to in the future. Or, maybe one of us will figure out a way to make sense of those many thousands of mystery files that handle the game's terrain textures. In the meantime, have you seen the Natural Freshwater palette edit by Serpyderpy? It only applies to tanks, of course. I think she was the first to release an edited palette of the tank water. I've followed her lead and experimented with editing the palettes of saltwater as well, which I should be sharing soon. Welcome, by the way! We have many resources compiled here over the years for learning to create mods for ZT1, always feel free to ask and search.