Hi all,
So, having gotten past my first dilemma which I was discussing in a previous thread, I now have a question about and request for some feedback/advice going forward… Bear in mind, I’m brand-new at WM and am still learning, so much of it is stuff that I still have to learn and understand, although WM seems wonderfully flexible, responsive and forgiving in terms of experimentation - which is a great thing. Unlike other terrain generation programs I’ve tried, which are very slow to provide useful feedback, WM seems capable of giving fairy rapid feedback, which is immensely helpful in making changes or choices as I go… Definitely a HUGE +++ in my book.
To summarize my goal really quickly, I am working on a game and am looking to create the overworld map for it in WM. It’s going to be quite a large map and will have to be broken down into tiled heightmaps, which is fine. However, in terms of creating it, I realize that having as many devices on-screen as I’ll need can quickly become messy. I have already determined to treat each major region of the map as its own group of shapes, which I can then label and such. Even then, if I don’t have some kind of organization and process flow worked out before hand it could become quite unweildy, I imagine, considering there are 27 regions in my world map altogether.
So, that’s the purpose of this post; to see about getting off on the right foot and nixing any bad habits early on so they don’t come back to haunt me when I’m many hours into the project.
For starters, here’s a screen-grab of a quick test I put together tonight, based on what I learned last night:
It’s pretty self-explanatory to anyone with experience in the program, of course, so all I’ll point out is that the File Input on the top left is where my map image is “stored”. I just go in there and click on “Set In Layout” (or whatever that button says) when I need to work on one of them.
I’ll be following a naming convention, and probably a color coded system for each “group” box to quickly identify what type of region each one is for (grey for mountains, green for grasslands, etc).
Mostly, though, I’m curious about how it will all work out with 27 separate groups of devices set up like that? It seems I’m going to have to have combiners connecting to combiners… decreasing continuously until I’m down to the last one connecting to the final output node(s). It seems to me that this could help with the speed of viewing changes as I can probably just disable the combiners for those “chains” that don’t concern me at the moment. Then I can just make sure they’re all enabled when I’m ready for a full build. That is, of course, if I understand it correctly.
In all, though… Does anyone see any potential issues with this approach? Any suggestions, advice or nuggets of info that might help me on my way? I’m liable to figure things out as I go but some early tips are always appreciated as well of course :).
Thanks!