Rivers mod đŸ—ș

Modding Outdated Mods
21

It’s a shame that the archipelago and river mods are incompatible – having islands sliced and diced up by rivers would lead to an awesome effect similar to the islands in places like the Bay of Hong Kong, where there are many small but very tall islands close together. It would be an amazing location to build a “pirate town” of hanging bridges, secret alcoves and sheer precipices.

For the sake of curiosity, would it be possible to manually mix the two mods together in order to get the rivers happening in the archipelago biome, or would that just break the generation of one (or both) of the terrain feature sets?

2 Likes
22

No. Because we do not have waterfalls, so a river running through one elevation to the other looks terrible. When the water on top reaches the border it stops and stay there floating, exactly like this:
iso
To avoid this, the rivers only generate in a way that it does not go up or down, keeping itself in a single elevation. This means it will never go up or down a mountain.

If I made it “cut” the mountain, so the river always stays in the same elevation, it would still look strange (this is debatable/opinion-based) as the cliff between the two sides would be just a sharp cut. Like this:
iso

Besides those two problems, a river is created using two randomly positioned points in the map, following the rule of being in the same elevation and pathable without going up or down.
In the Archipelago, the majority area of the map where a river can generate with such rules are in the “plains”, the area that now is covered by an ocean. So most of the rivers generated there would be invisible as its starting and ending points would be already in the ocean.

I will make some tests, if nothing breaks and does not look terrible, I throw an update to it. After all, it would be the player choice to do such a thing.

4 Likes
23

Ah, makes sense. I thought that the rivers might form first, forcing the mountains to generate around/in between them; but if they’re only looking for a viable space around the mountains then yeah they wouldn’t work in the archipelago.

What I’m envisioning would probably then need to be accomplished by modifying the island generation on the archipelago mod, so that it generates tall pillars with sheer or almost-sheer cliffs. I had thought that using the rivers would act as a shortcut, as I said earlier, “slicing and dicing” the islands up like a pizza. However, if that would only give sheer sides like in your diagram, then yeah it would be pretty ugly/hard to believe; and I don’t imagine that “blending” or “roughening” those cliffs after they’ve been cut would be easy to do.

Oh well, just another idea to add to the list of things I really should mess around with one day, hahaha. Thanks for the insight into river generation though!

2 Likes
24

Oh man, just wait for the next Desktop Tuesday! ; D HYPE TRAIN LEAVES THE STATION
*Oop
 somehow didn’t realize I was preforming necromancy : /. Well still, better late than never : ), 4 more days!

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25

Ugh, now I gotta wonder if that means the wetstone and drystone are functional. Ever since I saw the mention on stream I was like, “YES! We’re so gonna be able to make wonderful water features.” :jubilant:

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26

See, if you’re going to properly build up a hype train, you have to give us hints to what the hype could be.

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27

If by hype you mean working rivers, than please, I would be happy to retire this mod :wink:

They are, place one wet stone and it floods everything, place the dry stone and it sucks all the water. It was funny placing like 50 or so dry stones in the archipelago and have the ocean slowed drained :smile:

5 Likes
28

ALL ABOARD!!

APC-HYPE-TRAIN-gold-design-mock-forest-green
APC-HYPE-TRAIN-gold-design-mock-forest-green1000×1000 148 KB

(Be careful, though, 'cause there are no brakes on the HYPE TRAIN.)

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29

Haha, not working rivers, lets not get too hype ; ). Besides, I wouldn’t want to force retire a mod as cool as this! I am excited to see what you will come up with with the new stones though : D.

lol, that’s a great image : D.

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30

Don’t you remember what @CrazyCandy said about brakes on the hypetrain. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

3 Likes
31

Haha, this is a little baby train, like this: http://imshopping.rediff.com/shopping/pixs/2039/t/toy_western-train1.jpg
There may not be brakes, but it doesn’t really have that much of an engine either ; D.

But for serious though, we will be talking about wet/dry stones finally, and I’m super excited to see what you guys do with this small (but fun) feature : ).

8 Likes
32

Can’t wait. Already have some things I want to discuss about them. But respectfully I’ll wait till Tuesday.

2 Likes
33

Don’t underestimate what a “small but fun” feature can bring – if it gives us the option to create a dynamic (i.e. self-updating) system, the sky is the limit!

The first non-decorative thing that comes to mind is a simple water clock, using a tank and overflow design to create a pulser. The engineering will be a bit tricky, but I imagine it’s possible to feed the overflow into a secondary input which connects the tank to several drystones, thereby draining the tank faster than it fills and eventually dropping the water level low enough that the tank stops overflowing
 which means that over time the connection between the tank and the secondary drains will also dry up, halting the excessive drain and allowing the tank to fill/overflow again!

(this theory is all built on the assumption that the drystones only suck up water from bodies that they’re physically touching; if they just work in a radius around themselves rather than through contact with the water they’re removing then the whole idea falls flat
 but I imagine they’d use the more intuitive format because it makes so much more sense. Still, we’ll see soon enough :jubilant:)

2 Likes
34

hey @BrunoSupremo, since the multiplayer mod is out now, and being able to have those joining just download required mods via steam is retardedly conveniant: any chance of throwing this mod up onto the workshop? (i was so joined at the hip with this thing that i forgot it wasnt stock
)

35

I honestly had forgot about this one. I will do a clean up in the code and then upload it.
I will make it read the biome json for settings, this way biome creators would be able to better control how the rivers would work in their biomes.

5 Likes
36

maps just look
strange without them :stuck_out_tongue: thanks for wanting to update it!

1 Like
37

Nice one of the Best Mods in my mind!

1 Like
38

patch_notes_button Updated

So, it is almost the same thing as before. It has longer rivers and better performance.

But the main reason for this update is to call other biome modders out there to test this, discover bugs, or suggest improvements. Once everything is fine, you should see it at the workshop.

The following is also included in the first post:

For modders:

If you created your own biome, you can change how the rivers will be generated in your biome, very easily.
By default, the mod will only generate a narrow river at your plains level. So if you are happy with that setting for your biome, you will not need to change anything.
If you do want to change that into something else, go into your biome generation file and apply this piece of json.

{
	"landscape": {
		"water": {
			"rivers": {
				"keep_default_lake_generation": false,
				"wide": {
					"min": 1,
					"max": 2,
					"allowed_at": {
						"plains": true,
						"foothills": false,
						"mountains": false
					}
				},
				"narrow": {
					"min": 1,
					"max": 3,
					"allowed_at": {
						"plains": true,
						"foothills": true,
						"mountains": true
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

"keep_default_lake_generation" accepts a true or false value.
Set it to true to generate both the common lakes that your biome generates and the additional rivers. False to only have rivers, no lakes.

"wide" and “narrow” contains settings for wide rivers and narrow rivers.

"min" and “max” accepts numbers values, from 0 and up.
It controls the quantity of that type of river you want in your map. A random amount is chosen based on it, both values included. A “min”: 1 and “max”: 3 means that it can generate 1, 2 or 3 rivers.

"allowed_at" contains settings for different terrain elevations.

"plains", “foothills” and “mountains” accepts true or false values.
Set to true and rivers will be generated there when possible. Set to false to not even try.

9 Likes
39

As always top notch work! Thanks.

40

I can attest that it has some really nice results, and encourage for you to play around with the various settings; my first, over enthusiastic pass, I may have thoroughly flooded my plains biome. Recolour it, change the plants, I could probably make a flood plains biome out of it


3 Likes