Terrain Editor: Relative elevation read out.

[bustr]

I've been running into an issue while creating an extensive volcanic mountain range on an island, that I'm trying to gauge the scale of structures I'm sculpting relative to a player flying over it looking down. I'm wasting time sculpting every square mile with small brush widths as though players will be driving an M3 across every single square mile of sculpting I'm doing. In most cases the closest anyone will ever get to much of this sculpting work will be 5000ft if that in about 70% of the arena.

Is it possible with the x,y,z coordinate read outs to include a relative elevation from sea level read out in the terrain editor?
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Here I'm musing and doubt it is a viable wish at any point in the future.

I'm beginning to wish the terrain editor had a clone function so I can copy a highlighted freehand area of finished topography, then drop it in place at another location, orient it, and save. Still I've gotten pretty quick now at the rapid build up of base mountain ridges and runoff canyons across many sectors as a single entity. It would be faster to drop in clones from a master range, then use the techniques to create random ridge line bridging and blending. At least I'm reaching the point of knowing how little base block I need to really define the footprint, then just pull everything into place with fewer strokes versus two weeks ago.   

[hitech]

Is it possible with the x,y,z coordinate read outs to include a relative elevation from sea level read out in the terrain editor?

Not sure what your asking for the y value in the position display (center bottom of screen) is the terrain elevation relative to see level of the current cursor position.

HiTech

[bustr]

The position my relative eyes are when I elevate my view position above the terrain to see down onto it, or at an angle from very high alt to scrutinize how a large topo feature looks overall on the first impression of a player suddenly coming in view.

[bustr]

In this screen shot I know the tallest feature is the 5000ft Tepui top. So I think I'm 15-18k eyeball relative above the ground where I'm viewing. I think..... On the side of the Tepui runoff canyon area, it looks like some of the canyons are malformed and chunky, at ground level they are very well formed. This is the scale issue that eats up alot of my time pushing back down into spots like that thinking I missed something and it's just a visual distance distortion.


It would help me with scale to know my relative altitude since I'm doing all of this free form on the fly. Otherwise, I'll keep creating mountains and move this thing along.

[Easyscor]

Here's a work-a-round

Save your work
Select a field or field ground under the object tab
Install it AND set the altitude BUT set the object type to void or barrier.
Hit Ctrl+z to undo the ground rise
When you're done, delete the object

Once you have your alt you can use top view and move back and forth

[bustr]

I thought about something like that including setting down air spawns at specific alts in command positions over the terrain area in progress. It's clunky because pulling up and back to look at something is rarely from the same angle or heading. And in this case It's all on the fly over hundreds of square miles where I could be popping up 10,000ft or 50,000ft depending on the work while trying to get a look to happen. I give my wife vertigo while looking over my shoulder as I inspect a few miles of work at a time.

There is a certain amount of creative smoke and mirrors with the terrain editor knowing you are doing it, knowing that it will help players get an immersive feeling almost of, "have I been here before". And knowing the way the game flows, they will never actually walk around on a lot of what you create. What trips you up, to create that illusion you have to sculpt that bit of terrain to look at long distance or 5-10kalt close to what it might look like in real life. What a maddening balance when you are your own worse critic. I hate some of what I see in that screen capture, I just have to move along and make the next mountain better and learn from my own criticism, or I'll never get this finished. It's that polygon minimum size limitation dictating how much effort you don't waste over something that will never be seen up close. And Waffle has several higher alt vegetation tiles below the brown rock tile that blend badly creating white lines at the interface in the Pac set. The tile that could do the blend has random rice patties. How how I wish there was a generic blend tool you could paint over tile boarders.....  

I still have to come up with a convincing three way spawn on the side of a volcanic mountain that is immersive and feels realistic. Doesn't eat tanks and piss off customers, then duplicate that two more times. Which means I need to get all of the islands and mountain ranges finished so I can sit down and test tiles against spawns and ease of access to towns while creating a global convincing look. Waffle didn't give the Pac set very involved villages like with the Euro terrain set. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!