Oakranger has decided to take a stab at creating a terrain for the Special Events Arena (SEA). So to help facilitate his work on this I am creating a topic here for work on the "Adriatic terrain" for the SEA.
Basically this is how we do things over in the SEA. A topic is started on a terrain then all questions, feedback, research, progress notes, opinions, etc. by all team members are posted in that topic during its production.
That said I also need to point out that every arena has specific requirements for creating a terrain for that arena. The requirements for an AvA or MA terrain are different than those for a SEA terrain.
Not all the requirements for a designing for the SEA terrain are actually terrain requirements. Quite a few deal with the fact that we are building a terrain for others to run events on. Basically it boils down to some technical things (if you are interested I can fire off a PM with what technical things) and four not so technical main things:
1) Willing to be to take direction from a team lead (me in this case). You are building the terrain for others to run events on so at times the Team Lead will tell you no, don’t this or that. Or please work on this instead.
2) Research, research, research. Again we are building terrains for historically based events.
3) Timely production. A SEA terrain can take from 3 months to 1 year. If it takes longer than 1 year then there is a problem going on.
4) Creating the terrain as what I call a “Phase I” terrain with no custom or modified objects. There are exceptions to this but we do this for several reasons. The complexity can slow down production, it can introduces quite a few errors and unforeseen problems, and finally a new version of the terrain with custom objects can stop working with the next AH update. HTC keeps an archived version of all built terrains so if the current Luzon terrain stops working we can always put in place the earlier Phase I version and then work on getting the terrain working with custom objects again instead of having they terrain out of circulation.
After the Phase I is built then a designer can go back and tweak as much they want and add in custom objects to the terrain (Phase II).