Advice for creating a terrain

[-raxx-]

Dudes,

Learned from hard worn experience over the last few months I offer the following tips for terrain design.  As I think of more I'll post them here.

1) Read the Documentation.  Reverse Phrenology is for masochists like verm, wab, ogre, jarbo, fury and me, (readers of terry pratchett's discworld books will understand what reverse phrenology is).  It may save you a few hours of head banging when something doesn't work the way you expect.

2) Creating a terrain always takes 10 times longer than you expect it to.  There's a 90/90 rule for project estimation while goes "the frst 90% of a job takes 90% of the time and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time".

3) turn the Auto-save on.  Make a copy of the terrain every day or two.

4) Get a firm grip on the targets on the ground and what you want them to do.  It's no use having a country asset next to an airfield when the AAA firing from the country asset will deny use of the field.

5) nothing is as simple as it looks.  There are a million different points on the map at which altitude can be adjusted, (1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576).  Think how long it will take to adjust each and every one to the right height.  Then consider making the maps for the clipboard and adding fields and other objects to the terrain.

Spotcha in the Air

raxx
 

[Vermillion]

Good Advice  

Reverse Phrenology   thats good! And pretty accurate as well.

The one thing I can add is to have a good plan before you ever turn the editor on.

Know what region/theater of battle you are interested up front, and how you want to use it in the game.

For example it doesn't do you any good to build an elaborate 1:1 scale terrain, if its going to take a 2 hour flight time between bases in a scenario. Be very careful with your scaling.

Know where you want to put your bases, and what size they should be, before you put them within the editor.

Plan the same with vehicle bases to recreate critical land battles.

Good planning, can save you literally days of work within the editor, if you think ahead.


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Vermillion
**MOL**, Men of Leisure
"Real Men fly Radials, Nancy Boys fly Spitfires"

[-raxx-]

Planning, planning and more planning.

Excellent advice Verm.  The biggest problem I've struck with large arena maps is the cluttering of the clipboard.  It may be historically accurate to have 3 airfields near to each other,(ie within 30 miles), but it looks a mess on the clipboard.  I've worked around this by have several standard airfields near each other with different entry points enabled but owned by the one field, (ie. the main base has NE, NW SE and SW, while the auxilliary fields use N,S at one and E,W at the other). The auxilliary fields have hangers but I change them from being actual hangers to bombable objects for playability).

The next point of advice is be prepared to scrap everything and start over again, (and again and again).  I've redone the PNG/Solomons 3 times in the last 4 months as I've tested and realised that ideas were not going to work.

The other Beta testers have been through the same problems as we began to understand the editor better.

THe hardest terrains to create and make interesting are fantasy terrains.  If you want to create the magical canyon terrain remember that ever pixel on your bmp file is a one mile square.

The editor can also make you lose a sense of perspective.  An airfield fills a terrain grid square and is a mile long.  Mountains that look in proportion in the editor can be great vaulted towers when you hop into a plane and fly past.  Short drop offs in the editor can turn into the sides of the Grand Canyon if you are not carefull.

Limits on the number of objects you can place is a part of the planning.  4000 objects may seem like a lot but consider that every building, AAA, bunker, entry point is an object and the task of limiting the number of targets becomes quite difficult.  The number of objects on a terrain affects the frame rate as well as the number within view.  If you have 4000 objects the program has to check if any of them are within viewable range.  If you only have 2000 ojects than that parsing takes half the time).

More thoughts as they come to mind will be added here.  Spotcha in the Air