Are there currently opportunity to introduce for own map your own surface types? That is, for example, draw on the map are two types of grass, different asphalt...

And all this is not to replace existing textures in the game, but just add new ones.

Currently you can only replace the appearance of the dirt, grass, sand, asphalt and road layers by having textures named as dirt.png, grass.png, sand.png, asphalt.png or road.png in your own map folder, it'll only affect your map then, not the others. However, you can't yet control on which layer areas the grass blade decorations are added, or what kind of particle effect the surface produces when walked on, or what kind of friction values the surface has for vehicle tires etc..

That is about to change fairly soon as I'm about to start working with a snow map in a few weeks myself and I need to make the system more flexible in this matter.

Would there be something specific that you would like to see in this regard?

One way to extend this could be to come up with a system which allows arbitrary number of these layers to be used, but I won't start to do it unless it's really needed. The more the layers, the worse the performance, obviously, but in overall I guess the impact grows pretty slowly.

Generic static decals is also something that I'm looking to add at some point, extending from the current "zebra crossing" -object. It could be used to add local details to make areas look more varied, e.g. manhole covers and cracks for asphalt and road, grass areas could have local areas of flowers and whatnot.

I think your plan is fully rational. Map author will take care that his creation was playable, and he will create a sane number of layers. Have a little more types of surface than usual, but don't overload engine. The only thing that I could put here - the sound of a bullet collisions. Several types of surface will be spelled out directly in the game that will make shooting at the surface reproduce sound, for example, metal(1-4).wav, stone(1-4).wav, wood(1-4).wav. And specify the type of surface can be "object properties" in vector editor.

But this is probably a very minor importance, I'm just saying.

@Supchik
Mind = Blown

I understand, you think you are very competent. And I use the Google Translator and rely only on what he gives me a reverse translation to my native language.

1.Google Translator is not a person so it* (but like me by your comment you are not a native speaker of english)
2.What does me thinking i am very competent have to do with that?

1. I mean, I'm not a "native speaker of english". I am writing in translator on my native language and then translate the result again in my language and look how legible it. Therefore, it may obtained nonsense, but I hope that the meaning is clear.
2. It seemed to me that your posts in this topic contain only quibbling and don't develop the idea.

Then why did you say "Oh, you think you are competent"(In a very insulting way) instead of just saying "Why did you post something that has no relation to the topic whatsoever"(Yes, I admit my large mistake).
Yes,the meanings of the sentences are clear although the words are sometimes in an incorrect order.

Asking questions that have already been answered is rather silly.

It is clear English is not his native language, or that he even knows it fluently, so we can conclude that he doesn't have a complete understanding of how the language works. This should not be held against him, by the way, just use context clues and you can read just about any 'engrish'. That's how I've been doing it for years.

In any case, I don't imagine more that a few materials are needed for each level in terms of terrain. Dirt, rock, grass, snow, sand, then perhaps mud for naturally occurring terrains should cover it, and not all of those would appear in every level. Would it take too many resources to have two of the same type of surface except with multiple different textures?

Do objects and buildings get their own surface types on a per-map basis? Or are those pre-made things that have to be put down in each level with their surface type already defined?

_________________
Ozymandias, King of kings, God of Caves, Wizard.

Basically, different texture equals different surface. It's not the surface parameters (different sounds, physics properties, etc) that cause a resource issue, but the amount of times a visible piece of terrain needs to be rendered with different textures and alpha splat maps. There are a lot of ways to optimize this area, packing terrain images and alpha masks to make use of more texture units than the current terrain renderer, making better use of shaders and so forth, but if it's not necessary to go there right now, I won't, as I've got other things to implement as well. With the assumption of people having GPUs that support max 8 texture units, I could add one more terrain texture + mask very easily, which goes below asphalt and road layers. Anything beyond that needs to be designed more carefully.



Building roofs and platform tops should have a similar ground type parameter set as the terrain will have. Preferably it would work so that you could define several of those in inkscape and associate the corresponding objects to those ground definitions, so that it would work per object basically. This could be extended by introducing some parameters, like the sound references, for object sides as well.