Terrain Editor

[Easyscor]

Wireframe - This should probably be more of a wish then anything.

Here's the scenario. You wish to cut a canyon or you wish to add a bridge and carefully contour the banks of a river to meet the bridge deck or perhaps you just want to shape a ship's harbor to match a photo. That isn't particularly easy to do with the normal editing view in the TE but half the solution is already in the TE.

In the TE you can call up a wireframe display but I've never found it useful in the past. That could change and be very useful indeed with these busy vertices. I think it would require a change to clean up confusion in the display and I've included a jpg to show the problem.

The jpg shows an overriding foreground grid that I can't get rid of. As far as I can tell, it might be left over from some long past experiment. As you can see, the feature isn't much use, or at least not intuitive in its present form.

Of course, toggling the wireframe view vs the normal view is very important for locating the proper verts. It might also help later in manually setting ground types.

(giggle)
Being color blind I'd ask for the ability to change the wireframe line width and color, but I know that'd be too much. (I kind of miss the little yellow crosses when you selected verts in the old editor.)

[Greebo]

I've been playing with the CBM map making tool in the TE. It makes a nice looking map, particularly if the time slider is moved off centre to generate some shadows and highlights on the mountains. There is now an option to make the map either 1024, 2048 or 4096 res and the extra detail of the higher res map looks much better when the map is zoomed in. I know HTC don't like MA terrain files to be too big so is there a size limit for an MA terrain CBM or can I use up to 4096?

BTW for anyone doing this remember to save your map as a 256 colour bmp in a graphics editor program. Then rename the resultant map.bmp file to your terrain's name and move it to the texsrc folder. If you don't reduce to 256 colours the map will show up in the TE but not the game.

I also miss the little yellow crosses from the old TE. It is quite easy to make some crazy looking terrain and not notice it in the TE. Perhaps the option to have lighting and shading of terrain in the wireframe mode would make it easier to read.

A few thoughts regarding the new TE/terrain:

I really like the new town texture, placing a little village in the middle of some farmland or a town around a factory really adds to the look of the terrain. Also it gives something different for GVs to fight in. I also like the way the game only puts trees and buildings on sensibly sloping terrain now.

The new trees look great but it would be nice if a few of the textures had less trees in them, so I could create some "no cover" areas or a treeless area at the end of a runway. A GVer could be given a choice between a quick dash over a treeless area or skirting it. In the ETO terrain set I was thinking the swamp texture would look better with no trees, the sandy grass coast texture and also the plain grass texture could do with fewer.

[JimmyD3]

The small banana trees and the bamboo patches need to be changed so they don't stop GV's.

[hitech]

Also if you flip wire frame on, turn ocean off.

HiTech

[USRanger]

The same clutter (trees & such) being applied to almost all the different terrain textures is a major step backwards imho.

[Easyscor]

Also if you flip wire frame on, turn ocean off.

HiTech

ALRIGHT...
That's much better, thanks Hitech!

[Greebo]

There's a few minor TE/game issues I've come across while working on CraterMA:-

The first relates to tank town on the ETO terrain set. This object always appears as a blue square when I generate a map in the TE. It also appears as a blue square in the game at long distance, but this disappears once the object itself is displayed. I'm not sure whether this is a bug or something I have done, so I have uploaded the current CraterMA files to my folder on the FTP site in case you need to check.

Occasionally when generating a map some objects (some but not all cities, towns and airfields) display a brown box around the object out to the borders of the square they are in. I forgot to take a screenshot of this and the current map does not have the issue. I have not been able to find out what causes this, despite trying different textures and underlying textures below the objects. It seems almost random when it happens.

Another map generation issue is that the "show icons/field names/SPs" check boxes don't seem to do anything.

A slightly odd thing is that Bright won't work with the map bmp the TE generates. I got round this by loading and saving the map in PSP, then Bright works with it OK.
 

[Easyscor]

<snip>
A slightly odd thing is that Bright won't work with the map bmp the TE generates. I got round this by loading and saving the map in PSP, then Bright works with it OK.

Yeah, the new TE is very specific about what it will and won't accept, i.e. a 32 (vs 24) bit bmp of the correct size MAY work.
The old rules are best followed. 256 bit indexed map at 1024 in the texsrc folder, but as mentioned, the dang thing will accept other resolutions too, IF they're in the right format. IMO it's best to stay with tried and true 256 indexed color and 1024 x 1024 pixels.

I don't know why/where it's coming from, but sometimes the CBM and custom objects require new terrain files. I'll try to post more on this when I figure out what's actually happening, unless it's fixed before I can figure it out myself.

[Greebo]

I've had no problem getting the TE to accept my CBM file once it is reduced to 256 colours. While playing around with the splat map the only problem I had was when I accidentally introduced an incorrect colour and the TE would not import the file until I fixed it.

The problem with Bright not running the file the TE generates unless its saved in another program first is not a big deal. It is just Bright does a much better job of reducing colours than any other program I have tried. I mainly mentioned the issue to save other users some head scratching.

Currently my CBM is 4096 res which looks great in-game when zoomed-in. However it increases the res file size and I guess may cause players with marginal PCs resource issues. So I'll reduce the size if HTC tells me to.

[hitech]

I've had no problem getting the TE to accept my CBM file once it is reduced to 256 colours. While playing around with the splat map the only problem I had was when I accidentally introduced an incorrect colour and the TE would not import the file until I fixed it.

The problem with Bright not running the file the TE generates unless its saved in another program first is not a big deal. It is just Bright does a much better job of reducing colours than any other program I have tried. I mainly mentioned the issue to save other users some head scratching.

Currently my CBM is 4096 res which looks great in-game when zoomed-in. However it increases the res file size and I guess may cause players with marginal PCs resource issues. So I'll reduce the size if HTC tells me to.

Hmm, I may have to change the way that texture is stored in the terrain file so that it res is lowered with max texture size.

HiTech

[Easyscor]

I've had no problem getting the TE to accept my CBM file once it is reduced to 256 colours. While playing around with the splat map the only problem I had was when I accidentally introduced an incorrect colour and the TE would not import the file until I fixed it.

The problem with Bright not running the file the TE generates unless its saved in another program first is not a big deal. It is just Bright does a much better job of reducing colours than any other program I have tried. I mainly mentioned the issue to save other users some head scratching.

Currently my CBM is 4096 res which looks great in-game when zoomed-in. However it increases the res file size and I guess may cause players with marginal PCs resource issues. So I'll reduce the size if HTC tells me to.

I'm sure it must be user error on my part. AKA bits of rust flaking off my rusty TE skill, but I do push things pretty hard and if it can break, then I'll break it.

That's great news about the 4096 CBM!

[Greebo]

Thanks HT, glad I can keep the 4096 CBM. I think it will improve the look of the game for those who can run it.

I have been adding a few extra spawn points to factories on the map. It has been a while since I last used the TE but I seem to recall the old version would automatically assign a new ID number for each new object assigned to a field. The new TE does not do that and will give a duplicate heading report on the error check. I have manually assigned new IDs for my new SPs to fix the issue but it would be nice not to have to do this.

Another issue has been carried over from the old TE. When I save the terrain and then move my viewpoint many of the objects on the map both in the 3D window and on the CBM are then displayed incorrectly. For instance truck convoys may get white SP circles around them and SPs may lose their circles. Some objects appear as map rooms and have the field number displayed in that position on the map. The only way round this is to exit and re-enter the TE. This is a really annoying bug and is a disincentive to save my work regularly which can't be a good thing.

[Easyscor]

I don't know if this is intentional or not, but in working to create narrow rivers, I found them closing up when viewed from about 10k and above.

The screen shot on the left is of a bridge crossing a 1320' wide river from just under 10k. The river is 100' deep in the middle and the banks are set to zero ft. elevation.

The screen shot on the right is taken as the elevation increases beyond about 10k and the river starts closing up.

(sorry about the bmp, it was uploading before I noticed it.)

[Greebo]

Rivers do close up at distance in both the game and the TE. However its less of an issue in the game as the distance fog tends to hide it. I just widened my rivers to the point it looked OK to me in the game.

[Easyscor]

Rivers do close up at distance in both the game and the TE. However its less of an issue in the game as the distance fog tends to hide it. I just widened my rivers to the point it looked OK to me in the game.

Right, it isn't important for MA terrains, but in real world terrains for the AvA, the lack of realistic rivers and lakes is huge.