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My fault. I started that topic. Will this mod allow surface water to be defined above 'sea level', and for sea level to remain where it is? And rivers to run downhill?

Date: 5/5/2004 12:38:55 AM Author: If you would like to we could head up a small team to start figureing out a few things. For example we need to change the height that snow appears for the snowcapped mod and we need to determine a new water level im gussing its somewhere around 9 on a grey scale map. Also a bunch of other stuff woudl need to be done. Wiht your permission i would love to start a thread about this in modding open discussion unless you want to yourself ofcourse. quote> If you are asking me as the topic starter for permission, then permission granted! I have no experience of modding any game, and have only just started playing SC4 in the last few weeks, and that's what I would like to concentrate on, i.e. playing. Glad to see my experiments prompted so much interest and ideas.

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In trying to discover the effect of water min and water max variables in region.ini I've discovered an anomaly in how SC4 imports the grayscale jpgs compared with the actual height available in the terraforming tools. Using this gradient filled jpg for my region map and a 4 pixel by 4 pixel blue config.bmp I ended up with a region like this. I tried to regenerate the region several times with the region.ini water settings at various values, but every time I ended up with the water level at the same height, very deep water, and a graduated seabed like this: I then started playing with God mode to see how deep the water was and how high the land was and it was then I made my discovery. If I raised the whole land, it was 6 clicks before the sea disappeared. Water level always stayed the same, but the seabed rose beneath the water. A further 39 clicks were needed before a 'mesa' started appearing at the top of the slope and the land started flattening at the back of the map. Reverting back to my original landscape, I then used God Mode to start lowering the land until it was all underwater and the seabed was flat. This took 18 clicks. In conclusion then, the 256 greyscale image was converted into only 18 'God Mode' terraforming levels, and using God mode terraforming it is possible to raise height by another 45 levels. Thus a 256 greyscale image uses only 18 of the available 63 levels, or just over 28% of the actual height available in SC4. Of the 18 levels generated, 6 are used for sea level and below. (This confirms what I have read elsewhere that water starts at about greyscale number 82ish). The water min and water max values in region.ini seemed to have no impact on these experiments. The only visible difference I could see was that the sea and the land seemed to be coloured slightly differently. As a complete aside, I was pleased to spot a whale in the deep water off my coast. I saw several, they always seemed to be in the deep water and often surfaced, emptying sea water from their blow holes. I am a complete newbie to this game, apologies to all the oldbies/experts if this has been posted before. I did a search and could find nothing similar.

Truly inspiring. Would you mind sharing with us how you are providing power to all these towns and cities?