alphaniner

Thanks for fixing the issue with auto backup disabling. In the end I decided to leave it enabled though. I've been using the mod for a while now and I have a few feature requests that you might consider: Make manual backups (optionally) reset the timer for auto backups. In case it's not clear, what I mean is that currently if the timer is set to 20 min and a manual backup is done eg. 15 minutes after an auto backup, the next auto backup will be 5 minutes after the manual backup. IMO it would make more sense if the timer was reset so the next auto backup would occur 20 minutes after the manual backup. Allow deleting backups while in-game. Add a console command to disable/enable auto backups in-game. Not permanently, just until exiting to the main menu or exiting the game. Also, unless I'm misunderstanding how it's supposed to work, I think the Archive feature isn't working properly. I had it enabled it but it wasn't storing the last backup from each day. When I disabled it and deleted the archives, there were about a half dozen archives of the current day and none from previous days. Being on day 20, I was expecting the last backups from days 10-19. I mean, I assume there could be duplicates if I had loaded a save and reverted to a previous day, but that can't explain what I saw.

I think I encountered a bug in the latest Release (1.1.7). Before launching the game, I edited the settings.json file and changed the value of AutoBackup:Enabled to false, but autobackups still occur.

I'm gonna assume the space in the filename ("dtm_prcoess ed.raw") is just a typo. The IOException error usually means another process has a lock on the file. There's lots of ways to troubleshoot that, but you could always just log out and/or reboot. Well, even if you can do that, the OP suggests otherwise:

To prevent the sprinkling of desert and snow in the middle of the map, you have to use the sliders to disable mountain and desert. IMO it sucks to have no mountains though, plus having just mountains sprinkled in the forest isn't so bad. So I set the sliders to F 8 / M 4 / D 0 / R 4 / Rn 0. You could also look through the options for the 'landscape' setting, but there is no option for "no deserts & no mountains". Note the sliders and the 'landscape' setting don't affect/override the option you chose for 'north/south'. You get craters when 'biomes' is set to "add burned & wasteland" or "more burned & wasteland". The craters are the wasteland. AFAIK the only other way to get some wasteland is to set it as the border biome. The same settings for 'biomes' will produce little scribbles, that's the burnt forest. Again, AFAIK the only other way to get some burnt forest is to set it as the border biome. FWIW, the biomes are a bit more obvious if you look at biomes.png: wasteland is orange and burned is purple.

Not that I know of. helped me understand how to use a mask, but I learned how heightmaps and biome-maps work by looking at other worlds. The heightmap is a greyscale image where black (RGB 0,0,0) indicates the lowest elevation and white (RGB 255,255,255) indicates the highest. Water spawns at "height" 33 (RGB 33,33,33) so anything lower will be underwater. One thing to keep in mind is that POIs have elevation limits. For reference, this is part of one of my early attempts at a custom heightmap: Due to the POI elevation limits most of the landmass got only mountain POIs. Cities, towns, and other POIs were relegated to very near the coastline. You can change the POI elevation limits by editing the config file though. As far as Nitrogen is concerned, the biome-map only matters for creation of the preview image. But it's pretty straightforward, five colors represent the five biomes. The only thing that can be tricky is making sure no colors are used other than those. When you make your own, you have to make sure there's no color blending, anti-aliasing, transparency, etc.

Have your biomes.png ready before you generate the map, somewhere outside the working folder. Start generation and watch the text output. When it gets to the point "counting sheep" copy your biomes.png to the working folder, overwriting the one that nitrogen made.

You have to provide radiation.png. It doesn't need to match map size, the engine will scale it. Water is spawned at elevation 33, pretty much anything lower will be underwater. The mask tells nitrogen where to not place POIs or draw roads, it has nothing to do with spawning water. Biome-related settings are ignored when importing. You pretty much need to edit the biomes.png or provide your own. I prefer to have my custom biomes.png ready before generation, so I can copy it to the folder during generation to get an accurate preview.

I wanted to share a little QOL suggestion for working with custom heightmaps: I found I frequently want to test my heightmaps by making empty maps (really just for the preview image) to reduce generation time. The preview of an empty map also makes for the easiest way to mask water areas IMO. Rather than manually change the drop-downs each time I want to use different settings, I set them once and copy the resulting configUI.txt. For example I set Nitrogen to make an empty map, then copied configUI.txt to configUI_empty.txt. Then I set Nitrogen to "final map" settings and copied configUI.txt to configUI_final.txt. Now when I want to generate an empty map, I just have to run a batch file: copy /Y resources\configUI_empty.txt resources\configUI.txt java -jar nitrogen.jar When I want to make a final map, I launch Nitrogen with a batch file that copies 'configUI_final.txt' instead.

I know you made it as a request, but FYI "Find Vehicle Parts In Airdrops" doesn't seem to be scaled properly for 18.3. Everything in the vanilla airdrop is prob=0.2. With bicycleParts at prob=1 and minibikeParts at prob=0.8, my first airdrop contained nothing but parts.

I've encountered a couple of small issues with hand-made maps. Larger POIs (or their 'circles of flatness') often end up extending into the masked zone. I guess this is because only the center point is considered WRT the mask. Any chance of taking into account the full footprint before committing POIs when a mask exists? Something (I think road generation) is causing little dots of raised terrain in masked areas in and around water: (The shaded area indicates the mask)

Thanks for the help everyone, I've now gotten it all figured out. I even created some HMs completely from scratch using just Gimp tools. The filter that I assume was used to create "TEST_512_REL_TILED_NoiseTurbulence.png" can make a great start for an entire map. One thing I can't figure out is what are the light blue 1px dots usually found in groups on the preview map, surrounded by deformed terrain.

@Guppycur Thanks for clearing things up for me. I was pretty sure the biomes.png could be edited after generation, but not at all clear on what could be imported. In any case I'll definitely check out your videos. That's more or less what I expected, only the rad maps generated for both 8k and 12k have border thicknesses of only ~0.6% and ~0.4% respectively, both resulting in 48px radiation zones. That's just much smaller than the 200px default border biome, and I thought @Damocles was implying they were more or less the same size. Thanks for the tip. I don't know how to create a mask, but maybe I'll have a better understanding of this advanced stuff after watching Guppycur's videos. Edit: I found Cpt Krunch video about masks.

Generation fails when 'border biome' is "none" and 'no POIs in biome' is "burned and wasteland": ... running terrain generation ... exporting (1/3) exporting (2/3) exporting (3/3) ... terrain generation ... DONE ... ... running world mapping ... ... detect biomes ... java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 1024 at nitrogen.a.c.a(Unknown Source) at nitrogen.a.c.b(Unknown Source) at nitrogen.a.c.c(Unknown Source) at nitrogen.a.c.a(Unknown Source) at nitrogen.gui.NitroGenUI.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) 1024 Total time taken: 0 min 44 sec I duplicated it in a 'clean' environment without any of my manual changes to resource files, and all other settings at defaults.

I still like random mountains and rocky terrain, so I use the N/S setting and manually set the landscape sliders to 0 desert. Thanks, I wasn't aware of this. I guess I'm confused by the fact that the radiation map is always 512x512, and I'm unclear how it scales to the actual map size. For example if I scale it to 8192x8192 in an image editor, the red only extends to ~50px from the edges. So I assumed that only a fraction of the default 200px border area was irradiated. Are there any posts that explain how this works? For example, I once tried to generate a map with an existing biomes.png in the output folder and 'import from' set to "output folder", but the tool either aborted generation or deleted it based on the 'check folder' setting. I understand, and I hope it's clear I don't mean to tear you down.

I'm gonna be a negative Nancy for a minute, please don't take it personally: The perfectly round, flat area around POIs is unsightly. Randomly placed deserts are very 'splotchy'. The grid positioning of randomly placed deserts and mountains frequently results in shapes like 'L', 'U', 'T' and 't'. Buildings and roads shouldn't exist in craters or on crater ejecta. It would be nice if the border biome wasn't perfectly square/straight. Just curious, do you have plans to address any of this? ----- Re: #5. I noticed that even if you choose no border biome, no POIs are placed near the border. I assumed the empty area was based on the value of MAP_BORDER. So if I were to create a map with no border biome, then edit biomes.png to create a 'rough' border biome that didn't exceed MAP_BORDER pixels from the end of the map, would that result in a usable map? I can't figure out how to post a reasonably sized image or a thumbnail link to the full image, so see https://ibb.co/SQXB28x for an example. Note I increased MAP_BORDER to 300 for this map. ----- Edit: possible bug: In trying to reduce the number of craters produced, I found that the smallest possible value for GEN_CRATER_BASE is 2. Setting it to 1 causes the tool to crash: ... running terrain generation ... exporting (1/3) java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: bound must be positive at java.util.Random.nextInt(Unknown Source) at nitrogen.terraingen.c.b(Unknown Source) at nitrogen.gui.NitroGenUI.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) bound must be positive Total time taken: 0 min 3 sec