5) Modding of terrain graphic files

The terrain files you can find in your game\resources\_common\terrain folder.

You may have noticed, different terrains do blend into each other differently

Last thing on terrains is the water effect

This folder contains a textures folder with multiple png images in 512x512 pixel format.When creating a map, think of it as one layer per terrain, the png file placed side by side with itself.By actually choosing a certain terrain at a specific area of the map, the fix terrain layer will become visible at this area.For the ingame map is no square, but rotated and clinched, the same will happen to the png images. So your terrain images witll be rotated 45° to the left and get clinched., especially the borders of the ice terrain are unique.The blending is defined in the blending files found in your terrain\blends folder.These pngs are black and white, white for the actually placed terrain, black for the surrounding ones. The shape of the white parts edges and the grey parts define the terrains border and blending area/type. Here as an example the normal ice blending texture and the one I'm using for my space terrains to create a '3D like planet border': Here an ingame example: As you can see, the blending texture shows different compositions of the white and black terrain area.HiddenPath implemented.It consists of five files you can find in your game\terrain\water folder.The files normal0 and normal1.png do look like normal maps. The wave effect is created by having one layer of the normal1 image like with the terrains, and one wit the normal0 image. The first one (normal1) can be seen beneath water terrain, the other one (normal0) moves over it from the left bottom to the right top. This moving combined with color differences (or not) at a specific pixel at a specific time, generates the general wave effect.Same for normal3 and normal4.png.With the AoR dlc, the wave effect got splitted up, so shallow water has its own wave effect now.But that's not all, the water terrain itself and the wave effect do interact with the last image, the sky_hemisphere.png. This file is very special.It's not used 'completely' as the other ones. Like them, it is rotated 45° to the left and clinched to fit the ingame tiles. But instead of being placed side by side with itself to create a layer for the whole map, this one png is stretched across the whole screen afterwards. This is the file I'm using for my moving water V4. The red rectangle shows the visible part ingame. It's the top corner (after the rotation). Depending on your resolution (width) this area can vary (see the orange rectangle as an example).The default image is black/white too. At areas that only have one color, no effect is visible. When not modded, there is only a small part in the upper left of the screen showing 'reflections' and waves. This is for at that area different black, white and grey shades do change quickly.If you use a different color like green for example, the water will get a touch in that color as you can see in the cinematic water mod.When using the same color as the water terrains like in my example, the water gets a blue touch. But the water is already blue and my sky_hemisphere image isn't just blue, but has different colored areas. This way the wave effcet is more subtle as with black and white for the color shades aren't that different.What can cause problems are water terrains that have a structure themselve or contain a lot of different colors. This way the wave effect is less visible for it interferes with the terrains structure which breaks the wave effect. With different colors, regarding to the color of your sky_hemisphere image, it can happen only some areas show a wave effect for some terrain colors do kind of 'absorb' it.Sadly for the implementation of this file it's not possible to give every different colored area on a water terrain a matching area on the hemisphere image.