Do not remove dead trees automatically

[kaputtnik]

There are some dead trees immovables which get automatically removed from the map after some time.

I want to suggest to remove the auto removing.

Reason:
Dead trees are a visual addition to a map. A map designer places them to give an area of the map a specific 'feeling'. E.g. placing them on desert terrains to make it clear to the player that there was some time ago a fertile ground, but now it is dry. If the dead trees get automatically removed from the map, a player may never see them and so the map designers approach runs out.

It should be no problem if dead trees do never remove automatically, because they have size = "none" and do not occupy any building space. Also if a road or building needs the space they get removed.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

I think that living trees can also die, and a simple solution might litter a map with dead trees over time. This assumption needs to be confirmed though.

I can think of the following solutions:

1. Have 2 types of dead trees, one permanent, one that will disappear over time (meh)
2. Don't let living trees go dead (do we lose anything here?)
3. Allow foresters to plant a saplings that will replace dead trees (I'm in favor, but it needs an engine change)
4. Give dead trees a random chance to disappear (too complicated?)

[kaputtnik (franku)]

> 3. Allow foresters to plant a saplings that will replace dead trees (I'm in favor, but it needs an engine change)

They do this already. Tested with trunk. I think thats because dead trees have size = 'none'. For fun i created a map with all over snowman which also have size = 'none'. A forester replaces the snowman with saplings then :-)

Automatic seeding is affected though. Trees do not auto seed on a field with an immovable, regardless of its size. So once a tree get dead, it will not be replaced automatically with a sapling. hm, thats not good.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

So, have permanent dead trees, but allow trees to auto-seed on top of them?

Replacing snowmen with saplings is quite funny. I guess this could be solved by allowing multiple immovables on the same spot, but that would mean quite the engine change... we could disallow replacing the snowmen, maybe by having an attrib "destructible" or something similar for immovables that can be seeded over?

[kaputtnik (franku)]

The thing with the snowman is fine for me. A player may never notice this, at least because a snowman is a rare used element.

> So, have permanent dead trees, but allow trees to auto-seed on top of them?

Yes, i think that should work. Has to be tested how this will look in a game.

The immovable menu in the editor lacks a representation of the 'size' value at all. So a map designer does not know which immovable can be removed by placing flag or roads and which couldn't be removed. Immovables which couldn't be removed can be used as a blocker, like king_of_nowhere used them in his dolomites map. I write a bug report (whishlist) for this.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Migrated to https://github.com/widelands/widelands/issues/2096