This patch was made by

Loren Petrich
lpetrich
petrich@panix.com

It replaces the Lh'owon Day and Lh'owon Night landscape pictures with some that I had created.

This version has Hamish Sanderson's version of the 256-color versions of these images, which look much better than my original attempts.


To install, be sure that you have an interpreter for the programming language Python installed on your system. It comes with MacOS X and some Linux distributions, but you may have to install it for Windows. You can get an installer at http://www.python.org/download/ or some open-source package manager.

At the command line, run

SimpleShapesPatcher.py <source file> RockyDesertLhowonLandscapePatch.shpA <destination file>

You may have to make SimpleShapesPatcher.py executable or else add "python" in front of that command: python SimpleShapesPatcher.py ...

You may also open RockyDesertLhowonLandscapePatch.shpA in a shapes-file editor and copy the Day and Night collections to another shapes file.


The image files I'd used:
RockyDesertLhowonDay.jpg
RockyDesertLhowonNight.jpg

Some MML:

Makes the Lh'owon landscapes wrap only once instead of twice:
LhowonLandscapeWrapOnce.mml

If you wish to try loading the image files, you can use:
RockyDesertLhowonLandscapeFromImages.mml
Those files must be in the same directory as that MML file.



Since the landscape pictures for both M2 and M are of mountainous deserts, I decided to create a mountainous desert landscape -- but one that would look more realistic and less cheesy than either the M2 or the M versions.

I created an initial height map with Adobe Photoshop, then used MetaCreations' Bryce 3D for the bulk of the work, including rather extensive editing of that height map. I then used Photoshop and some Equilibrium DeBabelizer for such postprocessing as darkening the "night" pictures and reduction to 8-bit color.

This is my first serious Bryce project, and in some ways, it is incomplete (no buildings or moons, and the material I used was a preset). However, I may return to it sometime in the future to fix some of those omissions. Also, I did not find out how to get rid of the Sun's illumination of the nearby sky.

Reduction to 8-bit color was an interesting problem. A naive attempt at that yielded annoying banding, especially in the "day" pictures. However, I added noise with Photoshop, and that solved the problem nicely. That noise jumped around more than the new colors, thus making possible smooth transitions.

The landscapes will look much like those above when in Thousands of Colors mode (16-bit display), but they had looked rather horribly noisy in 256-color mode (8-bit display). This is because I made no attempt to edit these images to improve their fit the standard Marathon color table, and also because I wanted to avoid horrible banding. However, Hamish Sanderson (hhas@connectfree.co.uk) has done the following, as related in this message:

... your "realistic" landscapes. They look smart in 1000s
cols, but the 256 col ones looked like they could be improved a bit, so I
sat down and futzed with them for a bit. I came up with something and have
attached the results for your interest (the patch is very small [it only
replaces the Standard collections for Landscapes 1&2] so I hope you don't
mind).

I admit to "cheating" slightly with the daytime one and have added a few
new colours to that collection to get a better match to the real sky
colour, rather than forcing it into the M-palette (which is a bit short of
light blues, as you'll have noticed yourself). It should still be safe
enough in use, however, as it doesn't exceed the maximum 256 cols [afaik;
the usual disclaimers apply although I have done a _quick_ count and it all
seems ok] that can be displayed on screen  in 8-bit mode (the standard Mi
game palette is a few slots short of full, fortunately). Ahh, the joys of
Clut Modifier...:) The night-time one isn't quite so smooth as it sticks
with the existing Mi colours, but still a bit smoother than the original.

And with his permission, I have incorporated his patch into mine. So one can now enjoy a 256-color version that is much closer to the original than mine.
