River and bank testing GV micro terrain.

[bustr]

All of this work on that mega formation was to get a logical cap rock transition in the final screen shot so I can start the mountain range the green ridges and canyons on the left in the last screen shot are the beginning of. You can see in the last screen shot how the mega formation is unfinished to the right, I just needed the 25 miles of that crack and side canyons fleshed out to create an opportunity to put a solution in place for the mountain range transition in the last screen shot. It's a never ending process of everything is connected by the effects of weathering and how you define the rock strata in your theme.

[bustr]

Ever wondered how to cut a slot or a canyon into a slanted or sloped face?

I was cutting water erosion slots in a stepped sandstone face and realized I could take a few screen shots to show the procedure. There is no rule to this other than the bulldozer tool will connect two points with a plain the width of the brush you choose and the elevation of the beginning and end points. If they are equal elevations you get a level result. If one end is taller, you get an angled result. You can use the narrowest brush and raise an 100ft blip at two ends of a 10 mile line. Then expand the brush to 6 miles and as long as the center of the brush starts and ends on those two blips, you get a 6 mile wide 100ft tall result. Or you can cut two holes and pull a slot or canyon just as easily.


In this shot I've been creating water cut slots from the cap rock down.





Just to the right of the last slot you can see I cut in two holes.





The results of using the bulldozer tool pulled from the top hole to the bottom hole, a rough descending slot.





Now a cleaned up runoff gully.





Here is the line so far off the cap rock. The terrain editor tools are this simple, you just nibble away a few places at a time until you get your terrain out of the polymesh block.

[bustr]

And just like that, it's all done except for the painting.

[BuckShot]

Ciaphas,

Please build your terrain and submit it for inclusion.

Ciaphas, you should know by now that you're not allowed to make any suggestions about maps unless you make them.

Unless you make maps, the only comments allowed are at-a-boys and nice-jobs.

[bustr]

Buckshot,

Lets see your terrain or terrains and time put into using the terrains to test how players utilize terrains to build future terrains from. Otherwise, cut me a check every week for the next 6 months and I'll build your terrain, say $125 an hour. Do you really believe after this much time, testing, and observation of terrain usage effort on my part I'm interested in building other than my own terrain?

You know exactly where the terrain editor is and how to PM Easyscor to get a copy of the new manual along with his help getting started. If you cannot afford a copy of L3DT, I can help you with creating a hightmap file to quickly create your basic land masses and oceans. Then the rest is up to how much creativity you can muster in a 3D blank space. I have high expectations for you with the caliber of your clockwork derision's. Just look in the root folder Aces High III for ahedit.exe. Once your terrain is finished, if you want clouds, I can give you a hand with that.

I'm looking forward to the results of your efforts or Caiphas efforts, maybe the two of you can collaborate to help each other out.

[bustr]

Gotta stop futzing with this macro formation and call it a night. I'm months away from worrying about laying down game objects and how to orient them to influence players to create activity. If Hitech releases a new train\road\river function, I have weeks of testing to understand what that means to my design ideas and how it works overall. Unless you build a terrain, most players think only about the objects they utilize every night in the arena in a 6x6 mile micro area. In the end they have a myopic view of what a terrain actually is and focus on tiny components that are accounted for as part of the Macro Entity construction called a Melee arena terrain to get it accepted by Hitech for inclusion to the MA terrain queue.

Hmmmm.....I may extend that cap rock as the backbone of the whole range right down to the central pond. It's not like sandstone sea bed strata all over the world haven't been upthrust by tectonic activity.

You gents need to understand something, I started this 3D building project Nov. 12, 2017 after I spent development time creating a 1:1 2D blueprint file with every square mile mapped out. You can see how far I've come creating every square mile out of nothing. None of you have a clue how much more I have to create or what I've designed into the 1:1 blueprint I worked up to completion for every square mile of the arena. Fields\ports\HQ\city\strat\vBases are already in the can as one of the project stages waiting for me to check the layout for that stage. Why else do I put in all of the mapped out field place holder squares in each country so I can create the terrain around them? I post all of these construction screen shots because no one ever has for a whole project. Not to allow anyone other than Hitech to tell me how to build my terrain. Hitech's help has been invaluable over my last two terrains.


Not a bad transition with that cap rock.

[bustr]

Extended the cap rock to the end of the range at the central pond.


Made a nice transition out of the wide cap rock.





Pulled it down the spine of the range and gave it a terminus. I'll have to randomize breaks in the spine along with blending the outside into the slope to make the face look like an upthrust sandstone strata.

[bustr]

Now I've got my upthrust ridge top and once again I have to pull something out of my whatsis.....

[bustr]

As much as a terrain is fun feature carving, it's lots of prep work for feature carving. I finished the cap rock canyons transition into the running mountain range. I defined some strata levels in the river valley and prepped for cutting the long running mountain range. That's about 6 hours of work. During all of this I have to remember to let how water will run guide what I'm doing. That simplifies agonizing over how to carve a block of terrain polymesh into a canyon or a mountain ridge.

There is a tool in the terrain editor called a "smooth catmul" that is excellent for applying very slow erosion against features. It's not like the biliniar smoothing tool that can flatten a 25,000ft mountain side in a fat fingered mouse click goof. The terrain editor has just the right tools to shape it's polygon mesh.

[bustr]

Terrain is about transitions if you you are creating large contiguous topo features like mountain ranges that change character and elevation down their full run. Changing character is the challenge because nature is chaotic and random. But, elevation, water and even wind have a logic that holds true anywhere on the planet when it sculpts the results of tectonic activity.


Two transitions, on the left, why does the water run down between those two formations to the river and how much will be eroded away in that short steep run. On the right, the step strata were being water cut and now they have blended into something else at a lower elevation. This is where I create the character of the lower elevation mountain range run. I'm sure many of you in Jr. High science class did a project where you place sand on a board and tilted one end up with the low end slightly over a bucket. Then drizzled a slow stream of water from the top to watch the properties of water and erosion. It's the same principle, you just do it in your mind and doodle away at the 3D formation until you get something that looks plausible within the constraints of the polygon mesh.

[bustr]

Playing with a different technique that allows me to cut really deep or build up with less refined edges and not have to worry so much about making everything perfect with a micro tool. Once do the smoothing passes, the canyon paths are in place and I can use a cutting tool back over the canyons to make them stand out. I'll refine it as I go along with this mountain range. When you create a lot of mountains, ridges and canyons, you notice how the polymesh reacts to the tools. Eventually something clicks and you have a newer more efficient technique.

The easy part of this is cutting into a basic block shape. It gets hard smoothing the rough cuts to meld into a finished weathered shape that sclaes to the surrounding shapes and makes sense.

[bustr]

Painting in the rough canyon run lines then cutting in holes at all junctures to pull cut lines between really does speed up mountain building. You can see in the second picture how I set a runoff merge from the strata lines into the different terrain face and accounted for water runoff.

[bustr]

One whole day of work for one tiny transition...... Some days turn out like that, others miles of work just falls in place.

[Ciaphas]

Buckshot,

Lets see your terrain or terrains and time put into using the terrains to test how players utilize terrains to build future terrains from. Otherwise, cut me a check every week for the next 6 months and I'll build your terrain, say $125 an hour. Do you really believe after this much time, testing, and observation of terrain usage effort on my part I'm interested in building other than my own terrain?

Bustr,

This is what he is referring to. I actually just asked a simple question and ignored your answer because it was born out of arrogance or at least that is the way it came across.

on another note,

good job on the terrain


Ciaphas

[bustr]

Ciaphas,

I didn't see it as arrogance, you thought you saw an opportunity that never existed from my position. Which I hoped with my third terrain now posting pictures with construction commentary, the community had gotten the message to enjoy the show and not opine expecting me to jump and do what they demanded or implement their ideas for the perfect AH3 terrain. Amazingly with the first two terrains I was treated like I did something terribly wrong to the opiners and by them as proxies, the community, because I was not allowing them collectively to force their opinions to take command over my production and be their unpaid construction drone.

Here in the forums if someone posts something like this, some have automatic opinions and believe their opinions are the icing on the cake, and superior to anything the owner of the post could imagine or ever create. And so far, none are willing to go through all of the effort and trouble I have to reach this point as a content creator for our game. But, they will interject themselves at a convenient opening to opine in a less than warm manner, that "somehow I am a bad person" for creating content and posting the ongoing results without allowing them creative control at any juncture they want to take over.

As always my response is please, if you have a superior idea to mine, create "your" terrain and show me a superior way of doing this. You can contact Easyscor to help you get started and access to the latest manual which Easyscor and Greebo worked on for all of us during the alpha\beta testing of AH3. As I stated to Buckshot, if you don't want to purchase a copy of L3DT, I will help you create a heightmap file to get your basic land and ocean setup in the terrain editor with a single file import.

Here is a tip from my testing it on my last terrain. Too many GV spawns to a single target is not guaranteed a GV combat turn out as fewer do because of the way our tank combat takes place across all terrains. You can look at buzzsaw for an excellent test case which I tested on my last terrain. Less combat takes place in an area as the numbers of spawns go up. The exception is a high value target like a port because it's not only a port but the task groups assigned to it and it's a very vulnerable target hosting so many valuable assets with no attack aircraft and only a single GV hanger. So more than two spawns makes it a GV attack destination. There is a balance of transit time and distance between spawns and target that is more critical to good GV combat than the number of spawns. Fewer spawns means you have a good idea where most of the bad guys are. And now that I have more experience with micro terrain creation, and more testing of that kind of terrain, the overall micro terrain design really effects GV combat enjoyment more than spawn numbers. So with this current project I have much more work than I experienced with my previous projects and the requisite testing that has to take place with a GV at every single spawn I create.

I have my plate full and post these on going screen shots to show the community how terrains are built, my hopes of inspiring new terrain builders, and to show case Hitech's incredible work because this is a BBS open to the public.

At least with this project it's only been a single person voicing a detracting opinion opposed to the many with my previous projects. This project is already fully designed in a blueprint project file and any changes will either be Hitech requesting changes or he rolls out the train\road\river paths. If you think your ideas have merit, I'll give you what help I can if you want to produce a terrain for the Melee arena.