Enhance Terrain Blending

[Stuart Walpole]

• Repair the "chunky" terrain blending system. So that when you paint terrain it only affects the tile you paint and not overlap to the 5 tiles around it.

• Random terrain alpha blends textures (cornerleftblend1, cornerleftblend2, etc) to improve the reduction of patterns.

[Michael D. Hafer]

This is still a problem 3 years later. :)

[(none)]

Milestone Environment Demo deleted

[Philip Taylor]

The first point was fixed ages ago (right-click in Atlas to paint textures with low priority so they don't overlap surrounding tiles). (r8872 fixes the bugs that resulted from that.)

The second point (randomised blend selection) isn't done yet. Would it really be helpful? (The blending usually seems subtle enough that I wouldn't notice the difference between variations of the same shape.)

[historic_bruno]

One thing I'd like to see is less jagged edges. I'm not sure how or if this could be done. It really stands out now as an eyesore, especially river banks, shorelines, and paths that would realistically have somewhat of a curve to them. Currently they adhere to tile boundaries and it's not very pleasing.

[Philip Taylor]

It might help to just use smoother blend textures (see binaries/data/mods/public/art/textures/terrain/alphamaps/standard/) - I replaced the old ones since they didn't tile properly, and the new ones have a sharper transition which probably doesn't look as nice. If someone could improve them then that'd be good.

(For testing the tiling, I found it useful to create a black map in Atlas and draw white terrain on it, so any tiling bugs stand out clearly. It doesn't need to tile absolutely perfectly but it ought to be mostly right.)

(I think it'd be pretty straightforward to make the engine support different alphamap sets for different terrain textures, e.g. roads could have sharper transitions than sand, if we want that flexibility.)