foliage help

[thelusiv]

Messing around with the new scenery support, I've successfully added around 250 trees, but it's a pretty big pain to map out the objects in a text file. i have to make a row of them, and then copy it, then change the values and it takes quite a while. i was thinking, what if there was another way to map some of the objects - for instance, if we added a png to the objects directory for each track, maybe objects.png, which could be the same size as the terrain graphic.The png would work like this. Each dot on the map tells what kind of foliage is there and how dense it is. This data is represented by the color value on the map. Each color channel is broken up into 3 or 4 ranges of values, sorta like this:0-33% red: foliage a34-66% red: foliage b67-99% red: foliage c0-33% blue: foliage d34-66% blue: foliage e67-99% blue: foliage f0-33% green: foliage g34-66% green: foliage h67-99% green: foliage iInstead of breaking it up into thirds it could also be fourths, that would give 16 different types of foliage instead of nine. Anyway with the above values, a dot of value 33% green and 100% red and blue would be a lot of foliage g, but nothing else in the the area represented by that dot on the map. The positions of the foliage inside that area would be random, as well as the rotation of the objects. The quantity of foliage g in that area would be the maximum for that type of foliage's range (which would be set along with the model filename in the settings text file).Using this scheme many different combinations can be made, for instance a dot with a lot of foliage a (red 33%), a few of foliage e (40% blue) and a medium amount of foliage i (80% green) could be placed next to a dot with two or three very different types or amounts of foliage, etc. etc. Along with the randomization I think this would make foliage a lot easier to place.Other objects could still be directly mapped to positions as they are now.