Two years of listening, watching, and experiments across the first two terrains I submitted.
Please don't make me watch anymore Mario Brothers versus the Keystone cops with shotguns videos from the competition's tank arenas. I watched too many just to look at their terrains at the tank combat micro level. They may have incredible graphics but the game play is greiferastic kiddy time becasue two sides are "forced" at each other who for the most part are not playing a tank game as a WW2 recreation SIMM. Our tank game needed realistic terrain scaled to a tanker's perspective which the competition excels at. That adds about a month or so onto the build process on top of the months creating topographically themed and scaled terrain for the air combat players to fly over.
I'm hoping AH terrain builders will follow suit with scaling terrain from the local micro 6mile diameter around feilds to the macro level as part of a unified theme. The competition has been doing that all along as a product standard to compete for our community's customers. They could not compete with our numbers at one time so our terrains could be a tad rough, Greebo began stepping outside of that and inspired me that it was possible to go farther. Our numbers today and the expectations of newer customers require some amount of graphics quality to compete with the competition's tiny but realistic looking terrains.
Riftval was my experiment to see if it can be done with the tools, trees\clutter tiles and terrain polygon limitations Hitech gives us. It can be done but, it won't matter what program or method you use to get a landmass into the AH terrain editor. The hard part is making it look as real as possible and play well from the micro terrain for tanks, to the macro terrain for airplanes flying over it. That took my building the first two MA terrains from scratch using only the AH terrain editor so I could eventually create riftval.
Without numbers to keep customers distracted, they will pay attention to what their surroundings look like and how that makes them feel about being in our game.