Where have the rainforests gone?

[srkunze]

Hi everybody,

first post and first thread. Let's see how that works here.

I remember playing the original TTD with massive amounts of mountainous rainforests. I cannot remember if I could set the percentage of forest/desert but I remember it varying greatly and if was always fun to play.

With OpenTTD 1.5.3 I only get desert and some green area near the coast. Am I imagining something here? Or is there a trick when generating the world to get rainforests back.


Besides complaining: OpenTTD has become a worthy successor of TTD. Thanks for all the hard work.


Best,
Sven


NOTE: there seem to be a related issue on https://bugs.openttd.org/task/4313 Though, I thought it might be better to ask here.

[Emperor Jake]

I was going to suggest switching to the original terrain generator, but instead of hilly rainforests and flat deserts I also got hilly deserts and flat deserts! However, after some testing, I found that switching the terrain height limit to its old level of 16 fixed the problem in the original terrain generator. It also seems to work OK on slightly higher levels like 24, it was being set at 255 that was messing with it.

[srkunze]

@Emperor Jake

Ahh, I see.

It seems that only the top ~10 levels are rainforests. I could generate them with 255 and Alpist.


Can this be changed?

[hoemaco]

With OpenTTD 1.5.3 I only get desert and some green area near the coast. Am I imagining something here? Or is there a trick when generating the world to get rainforests back.

It's 2018 and version 1.8.0 and I still get similar issues. And I can find nothing on the forums about it that's not several years old..

I've tried all the various settings in the TerraGenesis and I get the mostly flat areas full of deserts.
Or, with the original generator, it often gives me a map diagonally crossed by water, one half flat desert, other half mountainous.

I also remember that long time ago, TTD had larger mountains with rainforests...

Contrary to some other posts, I found that the perlin noise generator is about the same for all terrain sets. I also tried creating mountains and plateaus (snow-covered) for arctic, without success.

Generally I find the Perlin generator (TerraGenesis) to be very boring.Even if I play with variety distribution, it's all the same everywhere (and regardless of map size). It's not very realistic. I've seen posts asking years ago for tectonic and fractal based generators, so I now join in asking for it! (Or make it possible to create a terrain editor newgrf so people could experiment. I'm not really so much into pc programming to touch the main code.)

[Eddi]

At that point, i'd suggest messing around with heightmaps (greyscale png images) instead of a terrain generator.

Bonus points if you make a standalone app that generates random heightmaps, it is theoretically possible to then port that generator into the existing framework for hooking up terrain generators (which was always the intention, but never actually done by anyone after TGP got added)

and yes, i agree that perlin-based maps become quite boring.

[acs121]

If you do this carefully and taking care of your documents it's somewhat simple :

- Start a new game to generate terrain.
- Save the game.
- Go in your "saves" folder in your OpenTTD folder and copy the save you have done.
- Paste it in your "scenarios" folder.
- Replace the .sav extension by a .scn extension.
- Open the game and load the scenario in the scenario editor.
- Go in the landscaping tools. You will be able to remove as much desert as you want.
- Save the scenario.
- Load it, and play.

Be HUGELY careful if you do this and try not to corrupt your save files or scenario files. It might turn really bad.

[hoemaco]

If you do this carefully and taking care of your documents it's somewhat simple :

Why would one do that? You can simply start the scenario editor, create a new terrain, and generate random industries and cities or do whatever you wish.

Of course creating large mountains is time-consuming. It would be easier if the terrain editor had the option to continously raise/lower terrain while holding down the mouse button (I think some simcity versions had it like that).

I was thinking about the heightmaps, too, tried the existing ones but not yet found what I wanted (one idea I had is to have a map with valleys in every direction from a large mountain, and very little flat land etc.) I'll have to think about generating a heightmap. Hm, could be a nice exercise in Matlab

[YNM]

- Start a new game to generate terrain.
...
- Replace the .sav extension by a .scn extension.

You could've just generate a random landscape, generate random amount of towns and generate random amount of industries THEN remove the unneeded deserts (or add new ones) THEN add in trees. Then play it.

[acs121]

I didn't think about that in the first place.
Thanks for correcting my dumb-ness.