Factorio Forums

Type: Mod
Name: Topography
Description: Simple Visualization of the height data already present
License: GPLv3
Version: 1.0.2
Release: 2016-04-01
Tested-With-Factorio-Version: 0.12.29
Category: Non-Game-Changing
Tags: elevation, topography, mini-map
Download-Url: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByAw9H ... 185TFhpZWs
GitHub: github.com/robopanda333/Topography

A small toy mod I made to visualize the height/elevation data that is already built into the surfaces.
This is part of an effort to get fluid dynamics and other entities to care about elevation, but that will probably be part of another mod that may have some dependencies on this in the future. No functional changes. Just pretty interesting.

TODO: add a way of changing the step/iso value, Changed graphics pack, and better mini map quality.

EDIT: The zip should work without decompressing now.

Only visually? And will actually be like in a normal game?
Very often the segmentation, for this game is not suitable. This is not Minecraft.
Need a bulldozer to flatten some vertices.

Source code (zip) [name] -> 1.0.1.zip [link] -> Topography-1.0.1.zip [download]
Topography-1.0.1.zip -> Topography-1.0.1 -> Topography_0.12.29
not all will be able to find!

This only does a visual change yes. It doesn't change anything and should work perfect with any other mods.

I will certainly be looking at the way things are done in this community and change things to match. If mods with dependencies isn't a done thing then I will just package them together.

as for the zip... ya... i didn't know that github did it that way. I thought the root of the project would be the root of the zip. I will be hosting it differently when I get a chance.

Edit: Changed the file to download it directly.

changed the graphics pack to not overlap dumbly.

Rename the archive name on Topography_0.12.29
Should be the same as the folder
Then not have to unpack the archive.
it may be better to use version 1.0.0 or 0.0.1

Zip structure changed... again :p Is it better now?

as for version number. I started at 1.0.0 for releases on github, but I changed it before posting it here. The current package is 1.0.2

I had no idea that the game even had a concept of elevation to it... could be interesting, having a mod with a spigot for disposing of surplus water in the pipe system (for mods that have water as a by-product of some kind of advanced processing) and ending up creating a stream, as the water finds its way downhill to a lake... combined with a finite water mod, perhaps even making the lake's water volume higher, causing eventual flooding... (thinking a little overboard, I know, but the possibility is there, with elevation)

-- Smoov

FPS greatly drops, long loading time
To open new territories is not possible, very strong friezes.
The idea is interesting, but without real teraforming not very interesting.
Need some ideas for optimization.

@Smoovious Ya there is a bunch of stuff that elevation allows. I was going to add elevation myself and stumbled on the fact that it was already present. I am working on getting a ball to roll down hills now as a template for elevation aware entities. (siphoning fluids, creating streams etc all things i was interested in doing :p will be posting about that stuff as i get it working)

@Factorio2016 ya it could stand to be optimized. It creates a new entity on every tile that has a line on each chunk generated. The game by default seems to generate chunks in the background around you for quite some time after getting into the game as well. I don't know if there is a way to set a function to be run as a separate task, because i would ideally do that. The algorithm is stupidly parallel, every 4 tiles are completely independent from all other tiles, so it can very easily be parallelized if there is such a feature. I think that if i use a tile set instead of individual images it might be a bit quicker (as tilesets are more memory efficient) but i have been a bit distracted by things to try that yet.
and as for terraforming... yup :p This was just a quick test to see what the elevation data actually looked like (if it was sane or just random which it turns out is the former luckily).
There is also no way to turn off the overlay once turned on. I will see about fixing that later.