17-02-2002 03:29									#1
	Question about terrains Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

Hi there,

I was reading up the format for the BIC file, and it keep me wondering about...

In the description for terrain it does describe how the terrains are created and that is pretty straightforward. However, in the Tiles section it does state that only a byte is used is used for the actual definition of terrain at that tile, of which only a nibble (4 bits) is used for actual terrain, as the other nibble is used for something called the filler terrain...

Now, I do understand it as that there is room only for 16 different terrains. I think that the filler is used to indicate the machine what happens when the forest (or jungle) is cleared. From this (and here is where I take great leaps in reasoning) I assume that although that I can only define 16 terrains but I have at least other 16 modifiers available... So, I think I can define perhaps three or four basic definitions for soils, like saturated, wet, moist and dry, and then put modifiers over those, so I can simulate soil exhaustation? Let me put an example:

Grassland would be grassland filler over wet terrain. So, grassland would produce 3 food, but over time it would be modified to "low producing" grassland, producing only 2 food. Perhaps you can have a worker there "improving" land (after perhaps, discovery of Chemistry) and then it would change the filler to "high quality farmland" and the tile would be producing perhaps 5 food.

The thing is, are the producing values of the value determined by a combination of the filler and the base terrain, or is it just alone the base terrain alone determining produce values?

Well, I apologize if this was asked before, and thank you all in advance.

Regards,
Omega