Friday Facts #401 - New terrain, new planet

[mrvn]

It's all wrong! There's a reason why both cliffs and water follow height lines, and no reason why forests should leave convenient thoroughfares for the character's car.

That said, this garden will make a much better playground than untamed wilderness. Even if it poses the question of where the gardener went.

Rivers often dig themself into softer rock creating cliffs. Those will follow the water and go across the height lines. Or the sea digs into an island creating cliffs. Again they follow the water but now they go along the height lines.

Mountains and hills will have cliffs going along height lines with water going downhill across the cliffs. Hmm, now I really do want water falls going down cliffs.

There are also valleys where glaciers have pushed through in the olden times. They can create features in the valley going across the length. That will be along height lines and water will flow across.

So I think cliffs can be many shapes and in many places.


As for the forest having fortunate gaps in them to allow driving more easily those were explained as game trails. If enough behemoth biters travel between two lakes then there will be a nice path there for you to drive along. But yeah, that's a bit of hand waving. I think the QoL improvement from having somewhere to drive is worth a bit of unrealism.

[Tertius]

I'd like to get a visual improvement of the cliff graphics. Currently, they often don't create the illusion of elevation or depth. Instead they are just walls on an equally leveled terrain. By the way, that's what I initially thought what cliffs were after I started with Factorio: strange natural walls. I didn't see any elevation at all.
Whenever I bomb them away, I don't feel I'm leveling the terrain, instead I just bomb some obstacle.

To improve the illusion, I suggest to create slightly different terrain on the two different sides of the cliff, at least for the 1-2 tiles next to a cliff. Higher side: more sand, less trees, less green. Lower side: more grass, more trees, more green. On a desert: higher side: sand more white. Lower side: sand more grey.
Add some filter to lighten up the higher part and slightly darken the lower part.

[Azzinoth]

This is purely a visual improvement, but I think cliffs should "break" the terrain continuity. Look for example at the fourth picture from the bottom, you can clearly see how the grass pattern grows across cliffs, but in real life grass would not look like that above and below the cliff. The second picture from the bottom is much better where the terrain inside the canyon has slightly darker color, but it doesn't necessarily need to have a different color, it just needs to break the pattern. This would definitively help with the 3d illusion.