Terrain editor brush

[8thJinx]

Is there any way to get the TE brush smaller?

Also, the tanklndne, ne, se, sw shapes, how come they're not used in the main arena maps?

[Easyscor]

Quote: Is there any way to get the TE brush smaller?

Use your mouse roller, or the slider, or select paths, etc. to make the red circle go away.

IIRC, you'll get an arrow cursor after you save, but that was in beta.

[ghostdancer]

Also visually the size of the editor brush depends on what your alt scroller is at. If you are zoom all the way out and brush size slider is all the way down it will be quite small. If you now change your Alt slider you will see it become bigger but not really since you are just changing the scale of what you see in the editor ... the whole what does a 1 foot circle look from 10 ft up and then what does it look like from 100 ft up.

[bustr]

The smallest brush is 1\8 mile diameter because the smallest poly square is 1\8x1\8. The objects you refer to are the component parts that create the 2x2 tank town object. I've asked if Waffle could pull the berms and present them as one of objects for the MA. Not sure why they are not available except on objects created for the MA as a component. Could be to keep terrain builders from getting cute with them and killing everyone's FPS by building GV combat paradises in the 2 mile band around a town approach.

What your PC can deal with offline alone while you are checking your work is not a test of what will happen when 20-30 players are inside of the 6 mile diameter around it. Placing 15 bridges around the tank town object on Oceania had me terrified I had built an FPS killer instead of a fun combat zone.   

[8thJinx]

Yeah, I'm not looking to load up objects into the terrain.  All I want to try is different terrain than the relatively flat expanses I see most places.  My goal here is to simply make different looking terrain.  But I don't to want start if there's no chance it will ever make it into an MA.

Put simply, if town tiles/objects exist, with their hills and guns and destructible buildings, there must be a way to make something the same size 1mx1m, but inert (no guns, nothing explodes).  This is what I am after.

[bustr]

My sense with Hitech was that he is not against creating something for the MA, it was more time investment than I had considering I was building Oceania. You can change up an MA terrain, it takes "time" to sculpt everything, or you can learn how to make a basic land mass elevation heigthmap file to lay in the elevation foundations and outlines of the land mass areas. Then sculpt those which I did with Oceania. Most of the world in a sense is flat inside of a 250x250 mile area. It's that scale issue you will beat your head against with the terrain editor trying to create an illusion of a larger world.

Do a search for great rift valley and look at all the pictures from up and down that region. As I look at them and the diagram cross sections of how it was formed, I'm getting closer to a new design. There are parts of the rift walls that translate directly into the limitations of the terrain editor. This time around I will have to do the 1:1 2048x2048 blue print first to setup base and strat placements. Then work up the rift features to support the placement while giving me opportunities to incorporate the feature solutions I built into Oceania. Once I complete the 1:1 blueprint, I then can convert it into a 4096x4096 heightmap file and create all the land mass in a few seconds as building blocks set to core elevations. After that, it's like carving a bar of soap or a block of mud. First thing is to create a map and overlay all the base locations so they can be transferred onto the terrain as white squares. And then all sculpting is for the sake of those white square positions which were set to the distance rules because my blueprint file is 8pixel=1mile inside of the terrain editor.

Or make a CBM bitmap 2048x2048, draw your land masses onto it, then use it as a land painting guide when you pull that up as the CBM inside of the terrain editor. That green dot which shows up on the CBM relative to your brush, acts like your pencil tracing over tracing paper, or tracing from one layer to another in an art program. You just have to size the CBM window to about half the work space to clearly see the green dot as you move it. You can paint the CBM bitmap with different colors denoting elevations and topo structures, then set the brush to each elevation and trace in the basic topo elevation blocks based on their color. For me it's faster to know black is water and what elevations three shades of gray will give me as the basic land masses. Then I create a grayscale heightmap file and import it into the terrain editor. I can be much more precise inside of an art program creating a multi layer PNG file with black(ocean) as the background. Then merging all the layers and saving as a 16bit grayscale file to be converted to a raw file for terrain editor importing.

Now if Waffle would put some animals from Africa in the object list that can be used in the MA........   

[8thJinx]

All I'm looking to do is add features that intensify the gv game.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the terrain editor can't come close to duplicating this with its tool set:



From what little I've learned, you need a tile to duplicate those features.

[8thJinx]

Or this (bowl at the 28 spawn):

[8thJinx]

Or this mac daddy of spawn areas:

[bustr]

The house objects in AH3 are I suspect part of a package from speedtree. So there are no hollow structures sitting on a tile like the Eu tile set has villages. You can hide behind those houses and even a few I think have arch ways. That bridge in the picture is part of the convoy path. Right now we have no convoys. You can place the current bridges on a terrain spanning nothing to just use them to hide under, around, and sit on top and shoot at people. I'm not sure how Hitech feels about that aesthetic appearance.

And those moguls in your picture, I suspect that is why Hitech suggested you look at the new tank revetments. Another big thing in those pictures and why so many want to go back to AH2 style tanking like your self, the really low tree count per mile that everyone was able to make up to 5000yd shots from a hiding spot. What you have is a "tile set" tile with a repeating feature of three moguls, S\M\L, trees and a farm building. Looks like the terrain builder used a 1\8 mile brush and one click onto another tile space he painted down first.

With the existing tile sets and their agrarian tiles, I've been increasingly adding grass to open them up which has helped tank combat. I seem to remember in the alpha\beta someone asked about buildings to hide in and the response was no. So far the Euro set has villages with well defined houses and buildings. The Pac set less so with huts and a few real house structures and the Med, groves of trees with roads and no buildings I can find. So if you want to go the tile set path, that means a tile for each of the tile sets in production to replace one production tile which I'm not sure will happen. So far I can't even get Waffle to update one tile to add more textured rock to a set. Or a one of object type set of S\M\L that won't impact FPS and will inherit the surround tile attributes for clutter.

Why live in the past anyway when you can create the future? AH2 is gone, and it's converted terrains are kind of boring with exception to greebo's and grinder that were really well reworked as AH3 terrains. Oceania showed that the community is looking for new after all these years. I duplicated a lot of the AH2 tank town crater with BowlMA and almost no one starts tank battles in there anymore.

[8thJinx]

I'm not trying to live in the past, bustr.  I want to improve AH3's GV experience.  You said it: create the future.  That's what I want to do.  But as far as gameplay is concerned, we took a step backward when we stopped incorporating the features that made areas like the Crater or the 85 spawn intensely fun: lines of sight that provided for challenging shots out to 4k or so, fights for prime positions in those berms over there, or the hill overlooking the base, positions that you could neither easily take nor easily get knocked off of, spawning in to within 2k (or right on top of) of a big brawling ground fight, breaking a tough camp, etc.  The new maps can't hold a candle to what those areas offered, because the new maps haven't put it all together and put their best foot forward yet.  In a nut shell, the new ones are definitely nicer to look at from an airplane, but tanking in one these days doesn't hold the interest that AH2 offered.