Additional Topographic Features

Started by Rob Seabrook, November 21, 2018, 02:31:01 PM

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Rob Seabrook

Hi Andy,

Any thoughts about adding the following terrain features:

sunken roads
stone walls
hedges
vineyards
orchards

Thanks!

Andy ONeill

Let's go through these.
Existing at the moment ( as boundary options ):
stone walls
hedges


Offering hard and soft cover, some LoS blocking.

The rest.
I will have to gather requirements, consider them and decide which to do at a later stage.
I need to get moving on the game.

sunken roads

Relatively rare but yes these are a feature of a couple of battlefields.
Frequently connected to other roads.
These would be a complication.
And there are raised roads in some areas as well.
I can't think of a battle in this period where they'd be used as cover but that's definitely a feature in later periods.
Maybe the way to do this is would be to allow you to enter an elevation add for a given terrain.
Which could then be a negative number.
Which sounds a bit nasty as I think about it.

At the moment you would have to use a greyscale image for your base elevations including the sunken road.

vineyards
orchards
Largely aesthetics I would think.
We could do an altenate fill for fields and woods.
Fields won't offer soft cover I suppose we could maybe make that controlled by scenario.
While orchards have their trees in lines, I would say the difference between an orchard and a woods is a bit academic for a battle simulation.
Might make your map a bit prettier I suppose.

At the moment you can set the background of a terrain to transparent.
There's a context menu appears when you right click when in Edit Terrain mode.

You could have whatever you like in a background image so rows of trees or vines could be in there.
If you look at Ed's little big horn map you can see indian teepees - these are from the map he traced and used as a background image.

You could alternatively use the custom approach.
OK this is kind of hard and scary as you're in the land of XAML.
But it does offer multi layers and patterns etc.
Draw whatever you like using any combination of inkscape paths.
Export those.
Build a canvas in xaml and position these.
You can set the fill of these to one or many images.