The big picture

[KTM520guy]

If you start a terrain, placing tile after tile, how do you keep track of the plan you have in your head? It seems that it would be easy to loose track of where you are at pretty easy.

[NHawk]

I don't think anybody places tiles one at a time unless they are custom tiles.

But, to answer your question. Make a bitmap of what you want, save it as an 8-bit indexed color bitmap with the same name as your terrain in the texsrc folder for your terrain. Then you can follow along with your design in the map window.

Link to info in AHWiki...
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/wiki/index.php/Getting_Started_with_the_Terrain_Editor#Starting_a_New_Terrain

[KTM520guy]

Thanks for the tip. That helps a lot.

 One more question. Is there any way to get around setting tiles one at a time? At the extreme, a 512X512 map is 262144 square miles. Placing one at a time seems time prohibitive.

[NHawk]

AHWiki info link...

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/wiki/index.php/Elevations_and_Terrain_Types

If you already have your elevations set, you can also do a search of this forum for "Tile Setter".

Edit: FYI, there are 1,048,576 elevation points on a 512 x 512 terrain. 

Edit 2: Also if you are looking for a particular effect in a battle zone you really only need to do it in that area. The rest of the terrain can be random textures.

[KTM520guy]

Thanks for the help. Getting a grayscale image has been a real adventure. I won't go into details. Now that I have one, importing it into the TE results in a crash to desktop. I'm ready to pull my hair out.

Hopefully more questions later. I'm off to the game to shoot stuff.

[NHawk]

Crashes to desktop are almost always caused by one of two things...

1) Attempting to import elevations on a new terrain without saving the blank terrain and restarting the editor first.

2) The wrong format for the grayscale BMP. Such as a the grayscale is a 24-bit color grayscale and not an 8-bit true grayscale BMP (not color).

[Ghastly]

Another mistake is to make a greyscale that is not the correct SIZE because you are making a smaller map (such as 128x128 miles) and try to import that.  The best way to determine what's wrong with yours is to start up the TE, create a new terrain, add a few tiles and adjust the altitudes on them (preferably right at the center), save the terrain, exit, restart the TE, and then export the heightmap - and then compare the exported one to yours. The one you are trying to import needs to be the same format and size as the one that the TE exports or "bad things happen".

<S>

Guy

[NHawk]

Another mistake is to make a greyscale that is not the correct SIZE because you are making a smaller map (such as 128x128 miles) and try to import that.  The best way to determine what's wrong with yours is to start up the TE, create a new terrain, add a few tiles and adjust the altitudes on them (preferably right at the center), save the terrain, exit, restart the TE, and then export the heightmap - and then compare the exported one to yours. The one you are trying to import needs to be the same format and size as the one that the TE exports or "bad things happen".

That is true, but I didn't consider that because the sizes are spelled out in the AHWiki. And there's a 256 mile terrain sample there too.