abstract grail
Some way for map makers to add rivers and lakes above sea level.
Rivers could work with a spline system similar to existing roads, with width/flow controls for each spline point.
A similar system to create enclosed splines for lakes. Would be great if they blended well into the ocean shader below, even just using the same texture coords.
In combination with custom statics, could result in interesting structures such as dams
sonic lake
This would be greatly appreciated! A spline editor for rivers along the following would be perfect:
An alternative could be to allow for simulating some water sources and applying a basic rule of thumb that anything below a 1% gradient would lead to the water drying up. Added to that, leave reservoir generation up to the map author to use simple volumes. They can make decisions on whether new water sources need to be spawned or not.
For dams, a simple static volume would suffice. In some cases a rectangular volume would be fine, but perhaps some polygon editor that allows for setting a depth should suffice for dams where a rectangular volume would end up clipping through terrain.
NB I feel it's important to stress that this should be an editor tool that generates geometry. I believe it'll lead to more consistent results that won't have too large an impact on map load times since the geometry generated can be pre-baked into the map instead of needing to be regenerated when the map is loaded.
🤔 thinking about it more, this information could be encoded into one of the colours of the heightmap and all rendered as one single piece of geometry. Similar to how cities are spawned. As far as I know, we don't care about what's beneath the surface and transparency isn't a large concern.
Have the tooling raise the heighmap to the level of the river/lake geometry and ensure that the shader renders the relevant water textures to those areas of the heighmap.