Would it be possible to create a mod that changes the water color?

[funkyzooboy]

My idea is to create a version with a more brownish/greenish hue—similar to the water found in rivers like the Amazon—to make it feel more realistic than the classic, standard blue. I’d like to create this myself, though I’m not entirely sure how to go about it, as this is my first time playing this wonderful game with mods, and I’ve certainly never created one before.

 

 

I’ve attached a reference image, along with another one I—very poorly—sketched out xD to show what I’m aiming for.

 

Thanks so much for reading! If anyone has any tips on how to pull this off, they would be more than welcome! =)

 

 

images.jfif

[(Designer)Vondell]

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.

[(Designer)Zarawatto]

I want to be like you when I grow up, Vondell-sama uwu

[VND]

Joining in here too, because yes we just have some renewed discussions and experiments around this topic recently.

 

You can also check out Fern's turquoise water a while back.

 

Vondell already explained how we have hit a wall. So I'm just detailing what we know about the terrain files so far. A lot of this was figured out by Jay.

• terrain.ztd contains the icons, terrain configuration files, and the texture file of each terrain's blending edge. terrain3.ztd seems to update icon files, while terrain6.ztd introduces Gunnite (show tank floor).
• ui6.ztd contains the single-pixel colour used in the minimap for each terrain.
• ztatb00.ztd -> ztatb10.ztd contain everything else. Each file contains the file of one terrain and the last two characters of the filename correspond to the assigned numeric value.

  ztatb	cTerrain	Value
  00	0	Grass
  01	1	Savannah Grass
  02	2	Sand
  03	3	Dirt
  04	4	Rainforest Floor
  05	5	Brown Stone
  06	6	Gray Stone
  07	7	Gravel
  08	8	Snow
  09	9	Fresh Water
  0a	10	Salt Water
  0b	11	Deciduous Floor
  	12	Waterfall
  0d	13	Coniferous Floor
  	14	Concrete
  	15	Asphalt
  10	16	Trampled
  	17	Gunnite

• ztatb files contain thousands of files each. For example, the freshwater file (ztatb09) contains 5015 pairs of .lle and .pal files, with 1 extra .lle file. Each pair stays in 1 subfolder in a 3-level folderdirectory. That's 100031 files for *one* terrain. .lle seems to be another graphic/animation file that was encoded differently from other graphical entities in the game. Finn from the aforementioned OpenZT project has kinda decoded them with a Python script and they seem to contain every imaginable terrain blending + terrain orientation/position, yet he couldn't figure out how the .lle is linked to the respective palette file. How the files then interact with the blending edge textures is also a mystery.
  
   
• What I suspected is that Blue Fang had their own terrain blending engine, but to make the game compute faster using a much smaller footprint, they just automated the blending engine to export every terrain combination availabe as graphic files.