[ATLAS] Vertex Color In Atlas

[Stan]

​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6lpD6eTSPE&feature=youtu.be

We should be able to color the ground with special colors, for instance to make a volcano as it is shown here lighten or darken the ground on needs.

[historic_bruno]

Wouldn't it be better to use a volcano texture or something? Seems like an image editor would be a better tool than Atlas.

[Stan]

Depends on what you need :) I just thought it could be a nice addition. Moreover for scenario you might need to have some areas darker for some reason.

[historic_bruno]

The greatest use could be for triggers.

We have terrain overlays, but I think they're currently a very hard-coded functionality, for the brushes in Atlas and various debug overlays. It might need some cleaning up and optimizing to become a more general gameplay feature. Otherwise we would have to start from scratch, more or less, for this feature. I'm going to make this a low priority feature request, unless people working on triggers decide we need it.

[sanderd17]

I think a minimap event (See #57) is more beneficial to triggers than colouring terrain.

[Stan]

It was more for custom terrain color than for showing the player something. Now Ben was right we could make a lot of textures.

[Philip Taylor]

Adding static terrain colours to the engine should be fairly easy - the terrain renderer already computes a colour per vertex (for sunlight), so it just needs to multiply that by a vertex colour specified in the PMP file. Most of the work would probably be the UI, which could be largely copied from the code for painting textures.

Changing terrain colours at runtime (via triggers) would be a bit annoying though, because it would have to be serialised in saved games (and in multiplayer rejoining), and it's a large chunk of data if you store it in the straightforward way.