I've been playing with the TE for about a week now and have a really cool (at least I think so) terrain design. I drew the elevation map in Photoshop CS3 and imported it to see what it looks like. Tweaked a small island's elevation to smooth things out, textured it and added a small airfield. Built the terrain and loaded it into the offline game to fly around and see if it was as cool in-game as it was in the editor. Yep, sure was.
CM Eye is da bomb!
Now, some observations...
It would be nice if we could paint elevation changes the same way we paint terrain textures, instead of having to select vertices and raise/lower or set the height by clicking buttons. This would make for faster and more fluid tweaking of terrain features.
I find it easier to see and work with the fine-tuning of the elevations with no water or land textures. It would be nice to be able to generate the CBM from the elevation data instead of the "painted" terrain textures or trying to scale the imported elevation bmp to the proper size outside of the editor to use as the CBM. This would create a properly aligned and accurate mini-map to orient yourself while in the main editor screen.
It would be nice if you could "fill" all zero-elevation with water. As it is now, you either need to scale a bmp outside of the editor to either add or remove water and then import it and hope it's close enough to not have water on the sides of cliffs, or you need to paint it by hand inside the editor. This would be a great time-saver and should guarantee no "water not 0" vertex errors.
That's about it for now. I'm having fun and hope it turns out well enough to submit for online Main Arena play.
