HOORAY!

[Karl G.]

I figured out how to solve the situation with the dirt-overlays: make any terrain-type with transparency render over the the background terrain type. The background terrain type will be set based on rectangular regions; one will cover the entire world (the "master" default background); all the others will cover specific areas.

In this way, areas with lava can have a default lava background, and when the transparent dirt-over blocks are rendered, they will have a lava texture applied underneath--but the same dirt-over blocks will show a "water" texture when applied to the water regions of the world.

Secondly, I'm going to write a "rules" layer that generates map info based entirely on rules you create (after the background and template layers, but before your detailed editing). This way, you can tell the editor stuff like "whenever you find a water texture bordered by two dirt textures on the north and east, put this north-east dirt edge down!" With these rules you can really reduce the amount of work it takes to create a world!

One more thing--right now pits don't work correctly (if you set the terrain element to have negative height, not only does it not fade to black, every square has its edges!) I'll be fixing that too.

[thadiusofx3]

That's a good solution. I especially like the rules layer, that could be pretty powerful.