I never really expected anything to come of this post or from your side. I planned incorporating micro terrain into the 6 mile area around each field with a spawn to it from the inception of my current terrain. You should actually build a whole terrain and get it into rotation like I've done twice, and this will be my third. Playing on these terrains does not make you an expert on creating them "I learned" with my first two terrains. You have to stop thinking like a player becasue that is too myopic to create a balanced three country arena that helps customers choose to create activity. That has been the ongoing argument from many who want to argue they know more about something I have done twice and they have never done. They argue being a long term player makes them an expert at AH3, while ignoring they have never built a terrain and have no expertise at not being myopic while bringing a Melee arena terrain to full term. I still get requests to somehow build my terrains to make the GV part inconsequential while making the air combat part all that matters. And the same species of demand from GVer's. Both views are myopic and won't help keep Hitech's doors open which is what I'm more concerned with.
I have tested extensively for use on my current terrain what can be done with micro terrain complimented with the clutter tile and two terrains worth of experience. There really is no need for "micro moraines" unless your goal is a super mario brothers shootem up fantasy land for tanks like many of the competitors tiny arenas are setup for gamers to super mario brother each other in a tank. But, those arenas make our converted AH2 arenas look lame like 1990's lame. If our tank players were really going to play like they do at our competitor's tank game, Waffle built the town to give them the same kind of super mario brothers hiding and backshooting you see in all the competitor's games while looking really good. World of Tanks arenas are about the size of our town object. And that really good looking attached village on the super large airfield is larger and even more complex with more hide and back shoot opportunities. No super mario brothers style rumbles by tankers in those. That is why I placed those tank crater experiments in the center of my first two terrains, Aces High is not played like our competitors. I learned a lot about our game's GVers from those experiments. A 300ft high tree covered pedestal under each spawn is more like our GVers........
I'm building worlds for the Melee arena where I have set the terrain to scale from micro for the tanks thru macro for the airplanes. The random hill generator algorithm in L3DT is just that, random. You can do everything L3DT can with the AH terrain editor but targeted to how you specifically choose to manipulate an area in the AH terrain editor. And you only have to touch the 6 mile diameter area around fields with spawns since that is all a tank driving player will ever see of it. So it takes relatively little time to create the micro terrain. It actually takes far more time tweaking it to balance the ability for attackers to hide and seek versus the defenders so both sides have a chance. L3DT cannot help you at that point becasue all of it has to be manipulated with the AH terrain editor. My wife still wants to buy me a copy of L3DT, not sure what I would do with it. Since my next project may be seeing if I can generate geo maps with Artik's program then cutting and pasting select parts to create worlds for the Melee arena. Then all the armchair experts can burp out terrains and only be on the hook for painting and tweeking them. Yeah, right......But, all they would have to do is pick some parts of the world they like and do a little finger painting at the meeting lines from the cut and past into a hightmap. Surely they can blend a a hundred mile line of mismatched geo features by hand to look like they always belonged together.
If you just want to burp out something to slap some paint on and throw around objects to give players a way to get into the arena and at each other. L3DT and poof, you have something that does not look very impressive to compliment AH3 or the expectations of today's game players. But, is that really what Hitech wants after all he went through to get AH3 live? I stayed with that for two years none stop testing and saw how our old converted terrains did not compliment our new graphics engine. And that was a complaint I've read along with others.
Ask yourself why I placed these 6 mile diameter rings around each field location? They correspond to the 3 mile radius at which I place the GV spawns and at the same time define only the 6 mile diameter areas on the terrain I have to micro texture for the GVers. This is why you first build a 1:1 8pixel = 1mile blueprint and map out everything from the macro topography to the micro topography. After that, I just connect the dots and texture the surface of all the geo formations I mapped with 2Dprofiles. The micro texturing in those circles is just finger painting in sand. And who knows I may make myself obsolete with Artik's program.
