Other World Mapper Forum

Hello! I would love it if we could set items (symbols) to not exceed the boundaries of a landmass. That way when we are using the scatter function to scatter trees all over the place, they would not end up in the ocean, in lakes, or rivers. This would be tough because I am guessing that people would want the tops of trees and mountains, for example, to bypass these boundaries, but not the bottom. So, perhaps a toggle to turn such a feature on/off would be good.

Any thoughts on this? Thanks.

Sorry it took so long to reply!

We could put in an option to turn on/off the images being clipped at the edge of the landmass, but that wouldn't stop them from being placed over rivers and lakes. Would it work better for what you want if the option made the scatter only placed the features inside the landmass and avoided items like lakes and rivers? If that's the case, are there any other items you might want the features to avoid?

-Katie

I would say, "anything that is a boundary." So, that would be the edge of landmasses (continents), rivers, and lakes. But the main thing for me is the boundary/edge of a landmass (continent). I don't want trees, mountains, etc. to end up in the ocean or half on land and half off.

SilverSurfer1221 wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 25, 2021 4:32 pm

I would say, "anything that is a boundary." So, that would be the edge of landmasses (continents), rivers, and lakes. But the main thing for me is the boundary/edge of a landmass (continent). I don't want trees, mountains, etc. to end up in the ocean or half on land and half off.

Looks like we would want a way to lock editing to a certain object/layer, so that the features would only get added within it?

If so, we'll give the UI side some thoughts. It's always hard to add this type of change without making the UI a mess.

Thank you!

- Alejandro

As a simple first-pass (which would probably be a 90+% solution), how about giving the tool a "lock to parent" checkbox? Generally speaking, it seems that, if you start drawing features in, say, a region and you want their distribution constrained, then you're only going to want them drawn in that region, not the entire landmass that the region is a part of. This would also exclude dropping the features on top of other objects (e.g., lakes) within the parent.

The main thing this doesn't address is if there's a road/river through a region (rather than being the border between two adjacent regions) and you want to constrain the features to only one side, but locking to an arbitrary object/layer doesn't address that either, so...

How about this - not ideal, but an idea -

The end-user first draws a perimeter that defines an area (sort of like a selection in Photoshop). Once this is drawn, the end-user can then paint/scatter Features by "drawing" within this defined area. Any stroke that goes outside this selection is ignored. Any scattering that would take place outside this selection is either ignored or constrained to the perimeter.

With something like this, you would need to add a new icon to the UI when Features are selected that allows the end-user to first define a "region" to restrict Features to.