Fern's Turquoise Terrain

[YoungerPrinceLothric]

I would also love to use that turquoise water some day but completely understand why it hasn't been released. I recently watched someone's playthrough of Hellblade: Senua's Saga on youtube. It's set in medieval Iceland and that's what the water immediately reminded me of.

[Fern]

Thought I would share with you a little from one discussion at DD.

Dr Rick: i have a question for jay - do we have any way of adding terrains to the game? and if not, is that because it is fiendishly difficult or because it is impossible?

 

Fern: fiendishly difficult 
These are part of a discussion with RDing who was asking the same question. So I experimented. When in non-merge and pause it defaults to ingame colours/terrains. Unless you add them to the game the right way they do not merge properly. I suspect because of the way it behaves it could be very confusing for building exhibits.

Jay and I have been testing the ingame swamp one

 

Jay: I assume you are truly talking about terrain and not habitats, since a lot of people get those 2 confused when it comes to ZT.

That is a tricky question. And I have a tricky answer. The short answer is "no". Having said that, I actually came up with a way to add new terrain in a limited, tricky way. I used a swamp terrain (using an unused image from the ZT beta, although any image would work) as an example. Even in that limited, tricky way, fern was excited about it after she played with the prototype (and after it took a couple attempts on my part to explain how to use it in the limited, tricky way). It takes advantage of a ZT quirk while sharing the configuration of a blending terrain and a non-blending terrain. When used, if one wants the non-blending terrain, one makes sure all 8 tiles around the non-blending terrain are also non-blending terrains, and if one wants the blending terrain, one makes sure at least 1 of the surrounding 8 tiles around the blending terrain is a different blending terrain. It might be possible to do a true new terrain if it is non-blending, but I have not attempted that. It might also be possible to do a true new blending terrain, but that would require creating new ztatb ztd files, which would be a lot of work, since the images in those files involve every possible combination of blending terrains in a 3x3 tile grid, so it would grow exponentially for each new blending terrain.

 

Fern: That bottom terrain picture shows what we are talking about as you can see it defaulting back to the original water past a certain point.
I also recoloured snow and gravel which you can see in the exhibit.

 

Jay: Here is an example of swamp terrain (about 89%) interspersed with some grass and dirt terrain (about 11%). The swamp terrain was sharing its configuration with the asphalt terrain and this shows how the asphalt terrain can still be used at the same time as the swamp terrain.

 

There is another topic there in the back areas with more complicated information