Daggerfall:Land creation notes

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[edit] Steps to create a map 'block' or pixel

The entire DF map is composed of 1000x500 land pixels, each of which is further divided into 5x5 subpixels as per the WOODS.WLD data. Each pixel can contain only one town or dungeon and has a given terrain type, texture, and roughness.

[edit] All Pixels

1. Generate land pixel from Woods.WLD
2. Smooth edges with adajacent pixels
3. Add flats to landscape (trees, bushes, rocks, etc...)
4. Check for a location within the pixel. Currently, the only known way to do this is to check all the locations within the current region. It may be indicated by the first two bytes in a pixel record in WOODS.WLD, but this is not yet confirmed
   1. Load just the maptable for the region, if not loaded
   2. Check all locations or a pixel-coordinate match
   3. Stop search on first match

[edit] Location Only Pixels

5. Load entire location from MAPS.BSA
6. Smooth appropiate land for location. How to get width/height for location or just smooth entire pixel? Smoothing should not be absolute, there should still be some random 'ripple'. If the entire pixel is to be smoothed, this could be done in Step 1.
7. Parse through the object list in the map record (post records)
   1. Load appropiate Blocks.BSA record.
   2. Parse Blocks.BSA record, create block D3D frame
      1. Load Arch3D.BSA object
      2. Add object to frame at required position
   3. Add block frame to land pixel frame at required position