Plea to HTC about the terain editor

[Esme]

I know this won't be high on your priorities for very good reasons, but... - is there any chance you can "de-geek" the TE, at least in its early stages of use when trying to create a new terrain? I'm amazed at how awkward it makes what should be the simple process of getting a bitmap into the thing, and it falls over at the drop of a hat instead of simply returning an error message or something.

This is the first thing about AH that I've tried that I've been severely disappointed with.  I simply don't have time to mess about with a program that makes a song and dance about the perfectly simple task of loading a bitmap; what comes after is going to take time and effort enough without having to jump through unecessary hoops to get there.

Maybe an Xmas gift to the community for 2003 could be a better FE for the TE? :-) (I'd much rather you carry on the good work adding new planes and features to tehgame rather than halting just to improve the TE! :-)  )

Esme

[DOODY]

Originally posted by Esme
I know this won't be high on your priorities for very good reasons, but... - is there any chance you can "de-geek" the TE, at least in its early stages of use when trying to create a new terrain? I'm amazed at how awkward it makes what should be the simple process of getting a bitmap into the thing, and it falls over at the drop of a hat instead of simply returning an error message or something.

This is the first thing about AH that I've tried that I've been severely disappointed with.  I simply don't have time to mess about with a program that makes a song and dance about the perfectly simple task of loading a bitmap; what comes after is going to take time and effort enough without having to jump through unecessary hoops to get there.

Maybe an Xmas gift to the community for 2003 could be a better FE for the TE? :-) (I'd much rather you carry on the good work adding new planes and features to tehgame rather than halting just to improve the TE! :-)  )

Esme

 This sounds familiar..
 I was a lil p-o'd about the editor at first too. But its really not as tricky as you might think.  
 Here's a quick look of how-to

1 create a 1024X1024 gray scale of your map
 ( I always but a solit white dot in the center of my water to set the height to max. that way, you know exactly where water is "0" and mtn ceiling "255", then the RGB level will be the alt of a given pixel)

2. create a blank terrain w/ TE and exit
download and run bmp2map ( be sure to save in/and as the same map u just created)

3. open TE..

 v'Allah!

p.s. dont get frustrated.. We've got a community now.. just ask.

[Esme]

(Chuckle...) thanks Doody, I will heed your advice when next I take a look at the TE. It's just that life being rather busy, I simply didn't have time to wrestle with what should be the simple process of loading a bitmap file into the TE. I can't see any reason why one shouldn't simply be able to creat a suitable bitmap in a paint program, then use a file browser in the TE to load it in, mess with it in the TE, then save it out. I mean, thet's a fairly fundamental way of doing things in any data-handling program... - especially graphics ones, and that, in effect, is what the TE is.  So why is it so flipping awkward? And why does the darned thing fall over rather than just simply winge that I didn't do what it wanted me to do?  (Shrugs...)

I'm not goin to let it put me off altogether, but it IS delaying me getting to grips with the TE, because there's several other things calling for my time, so anything that is unecessarily awkward is going straight to the bottom of the priority list!

Esme