Platform Masters development - the new forested mountains

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https://www.patreon.com/ulillillia --- The mountains for worlds 11 (Maglev Train) and 14 (Musan Taiga) have detailed and realistic foresting. This series of 18 segments show the before and after comparison of the 2 worlds, detailing the various changes made, showing them off, and ultimately detailing what's left for those worlds. Overall, I'm very impressed with how well they turned out!
Segments:
1. Introduction - showing what the new mountains look like in world 11 for a first glance.
2. Flashback - repeating the same thing but with how the mountains were before.
3. The big changes in texturing, showing the foresting gradient where different types of trees come and go as elevation increases until they reach the timberline where they abruptly stop.
4. Flashback - showing how the mountains were in world 14, and part of the reason for the change.
5. Inspirations and experience from traveling being applied, along with general patterns I've figured out such as the offset of foresting scaling with the cosine of the latitude and linearly with elevation, plus local effects and conditions.
6. Maglev train has a base latitude of 31.75°N but, due to being right smack in the heart of the Sentus Mountains, a very high base elevation of about 5000 feet (1500 meters). It's actually going through a gap in the mountains known as the Ryanara Passage.
7. Musan Taiga, on the other hand, has a base latitude of 54°N but a much lower base elevation of a bit under 2400 feet (700 meters). The latitude starts having a significant impact when going much past about 40°N.
8. The old layer-based system was effective on memory usage and drawing, and was easy to work with, the 3D effects from parallax scrolling aren't as strong or as pronounced. Also, with the mountains as big as they are, filling up a significant portion of the screen, it made great sense to individualize them.
9. Since I was after redoing the mountains, I decided to make them a bit bigger as well. The highest they reach is basically unchanged, it's just that the closer ones rise up in height much faster than before which causes them to get a higher pixel height. The mountain at 112 SU, the closest in Maglev Train that has the timberline, is the tallest by pixel count, at 576 (3/4 the height of the screen). The 128 SU mountain (immediately to the right) is almost the same at 560 pixels tall.
10. I've improved the lighting significantly. GIMP's old tile-based system had too low of a maximum tile size, didn't seamlessly tile the output, and it was impossible to get rid of the seam since minimum tile spacing was 1 when I needed 0. Thus, I wrote my own program for it, utilizing triangles.
11. With the mountains individualized, the parallax scrolling is significantly better which goes in line with PM's case of taking parallax scrolling to an extreme never seen before. After all, everything is realistically to scale!
12. From super high up, can you spot the mountain at 1120 SU, the farthest visible? It's hard to see, due to being at the edge of visibility, but it's there. I point it out to you to help.
13. Against the sky, however, that mountain at 1120 SU is much easier to see but it's almost featureless.
14. Changes in store for world 10, Sentus Mountains - there will be a mountain at 96 SU which is almost 3 times closer than the closest ones at the moment. The estimated size is about 3520x1440. It's a huge monster! It makes sense though - you're in a valley between mountains so you'd only have a short distance to go to reach the next mountain. When you get up to a peak, you'd first have to descend that peak before you get to the next mountain. The mountains follow along with the foreground landscape. Of course, it'll mean having to redo the ground decals. Emerist will get moved, but Ryanara and Lake Ryan are not affected. Ground decals will also use a 64 Kbl repeat width instead of the current 32 so that they match up with the foreground landscape. There's other mountains intended to be at 160, 192, and various others. There are 64 unique mountains.
15. Changes in store for world 9, Carnivalesta - the mountains will become slightly bigger than what they were before, but the individualization will still be present. Hersiak will be getting moved closer, at 512 SU instead of the 576 or whatever it's at now, and I also intend on a design change based on a new technique I have for making cities at night. I intend on having a similar such smaller town at 256 SU.

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ulillillia