Editor improvements

Planning and Development

I’ve been rewriting the editor but also adding in new features and the most exciting thing so far is what I’m calling a color map.  This is an image that defines the color of each individual triangle on a piece of terrain in the world.  Right now the editor will load in a color map and color the terrain appropriately, but I have to use an image editing tool like GIMP to actually create the image.  The next step is to add in some terrain painting tools so that I can change the color of the terrain right in the editor, then just save it.  This is really fantastic because it maintains the flat-shaded, low polygon look, but allows me to make terrains that are very varied in terms of color.  I can make paths, snowy peaks, beaches, meadows, etc. without textures.  The color map images are very small.  The world terrain consists of right triangles.  The short sides of those triangles are 8 meters long.  So, a 1,024 m x 1,024 m chunk of terrain consists of 256 x 128 triangles.  (Think about it.  Each row of squares in the terrain will have two triangles per square, but there are sill only 128 columns.)  Each triangle needs just one pixel to store the color of the whole thing, so my test color map is 256 pixels x 128 pixels and right now is less than 18KB as a .png file.  That size will probably grow as I add more variation to the map, but in any case we’re looking at some pretty tiny files to produce a (hopefully) interesting looking world.

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