[ExultStudio] Macro functions

[Andrea B Previtera]

While building a huge world (not with ExultStudio), I am encountering the problem of creating woods, mountain chains and so on, not to mention the terrain itself.

Now, the latter is easily (actually not so easily, but...) solveable: an NxM 8 bit bitmap can be used as a base map. Gradients of green are grass tiles, gradients of brown are soil, yellow is sand... and so on. So, a basic land is build from this map. Something like this may be very useful in Exult when creating a new world from scratch.

As for woods and other groups of scattered items of the same kind, I can see a solution like this: initially you define some groups. For example, "tropical vegetation" - you add some palm trees to this group, and assign a frequency to each item. Then some plants, flowers, a couple rocks. Wherever you want to have a tropical forest grow, you trace the boundaries of a polygon on the map (the reference bitmap I described before), and all the tiles falling in such polygon are filled with items taken from the group, depending on their frequency and some other parameters.
This would be very useful too...

[SB-X]

Re. paragraph #2:
Mockup?
http://exult.info/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14942#p14942

Re. paragraph #3:
But the space efficient U7 system of chunks does not easily lend itself to this type of small-scale random manipulation.