Feature list randomization refinements

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nDervish
Posts: 93
Joined: Sat Nov 15, 2014 12:18 am

Feature list randomization refinements

Post by nDervish » Sun Sep 15, 2019 5:10 am

I've been doing some mountain ranges with feature lists lately, and discovered a couple things that I'd really like to have present for this sort of thing:

1) More randomization when picking randomly from a feature list.

It currently picks at random from the features on the list, which is good as far as it goes, but you'd also be able to get a lot more variety in the feature stamps if, when picking the next stamp, it (optionally, of course) randomly toggled the flip horizontal/vertical settings and varied the scale percentage by a user-chosen amount. e.g., When placing my mountains, I would have turned on random horizontal flipping (effectively doubling the number of different mountain images available) and scaled them to random sizes in the 35%-65% range (so every instance of the same image aren't all the same size). Instead, I just left them all at 50% and occasionally stopped to manually toggle the horizontal flip.

2) Make sizes more consistent within a list.

At its core, I suppose this is really more of an issue with the feature art than a technical matter, but, in the mountain feature sets, there is a huge variation in the size of the images. Within the Basic Terrain/Brown Mountains Small set (which I've mostly been using), BrownMountainSmall1.png is 38x46 pixels, while BrownMountainSmall50.png is 219x131, making it somewhat difficult to use them together in the same feature list, even though both are from the same feature set (and both tagged as "small"). It feels like there should be some technical way to automatically put all the features in a feature list onto a similar scale without just making them the same absolute pixel size, but I can't think of how to actually do it. But maybe if I present it as a wishlist item, someone else will have a bright idea for how to solve it. :D

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Kanchou
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Posts: 1021
Joined: Mon Nov 10, 2014 2:23 pm

Re: Feature list randomization refinements

Post by Kanchou » Thu Sep 19, 2019 8:34 pm

Thank you for the feedback!!
nDervish wrote: 1) More randomization when picking randomly from a feature list.

It currently picks at random from the features on the list, which is good as far as it goes, but you'd also be able to get a lot more variety in the feature stamps if, when picking the next stamp, it (optionally, of course) randomly toggled the flip horizontal/vertical settings and varied the scale percentage by a user-chosen amount. e.g., When placing my mountains, I would have turned on random horizontal flipping (effectively doubling the number of different mountain images available) and scaled them to random sizes in the 35%-65% range (so every instance of the same image aren't all the same size). Instead, I just left them all at 50% and occasionally stopped to manually toggle the horizontal flip.
We should be adding this with the version after the one coming out next week. It's at the top of what didn't quite make it for this one :D
nDervish wrote: 2) Make sizes more consistent within a list.

At its core, I suppose this is really more of an issue with the feature art than a technical matter, but, in the mountain feature sets, there is a huge variation in the size of the images. Within the Basic Terrain/Brown Mountains Small set (which I've mostly been using), BrownMountainSmall1.png is 38x46 pixels, while BrownMountainSmall50.png is 219x131, making it somewhat difficult to use them together in the same feature list, even though both are from the same feature set (and both tagged as "small"). It feels like there should be some technical way to automatically put all the features in a feature list onto a similar scale without just making them the same absolute pixel size, but I can't think of how to actually do it. But maybe if I present it as a wishlist item, someone else will have a bright idea for how to solve it. :D
It actually bugs me too, we'll try to brain storm over here but if anyone comes up with a good idea that would we awesome!

- Alejandro
Alejandro S. Canosa
Three Minds Software

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