Terrain Editor

[Easyscor]

TE recommendation.

When converting an AH2 terrain, I suggest that the rotation of all Group Masters be set to zero except for Ports and those should be checked for 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees. To support this, I point to blksea and blkseaw, not because I'm picking on them, but because that's where I see the problem in extreme.

I was checking something else and noticed that many of the field icons are upside down. V-bases are the easiest to spot but airfields show upside down as well so presumably some towns and maybe factories are also rotated. In all the cases I checked, the square tile object isn't rotated precisely and it opens the terrain to water along with mismatching the surrounding elevations. If the builder still wants to rotate them after the conversion, he still could.

[bustr]

I decided to ask in here before I blew up all of my work by accident.

I start out painting with one terrain set, then decide I want to incorporate some clutter or rock effects from another set. I then choose that next terrain set, does it automatically convert all terrain painting I've done up to that point to the new terrain set? Or can I mix and match?

Thank you.

[hitech]

You can not mix and match terrsets.  But any terrset can be displayed on any terrain.
So even after your terrain is built, a different terrest can be selected.


If you wish different ground clutter types (I.E. not trees and thing but the stuff you can turn off), you can over ride those by setting up a clutter def file.

HiTech

[bustr]

I wanted some additional variance in the exposed rock for cliffs and higher elevations that didn't include trees. All the 500-1000 foot faces I've climbed had almost no vegetation let alone a line of oaks growing out of the faces. The long black cracks yes. The eruo summer tile set has the mixed exposed pearl white rock with oaks in cracks and to the left the grass and blue green partially exposed rock that seems to inherit trees based on slope angle.

A rock tile in a color of gray between the two rock colors would allow for tempering those bright white cliffs more realistically. I thought one of the other terrain sets might have that.

[Easyscor]

TE 0.02 p1 & p2

Upon Exit or Close from the TE, I get the "ahedit.exe has stopped working"

I've tried several terrains to see if it might be a terrain problem but the error message always came up.

[ghostdancer]

In regards to hand painting beaches Greebo what does this actually mean?

The maximum safe number of hand painted beach points is 256 points.

Does it mean:

A) There can only be 256 points for the total map?

or

B) Does it mean while you are actually drawing that you can only put down 256 max beach points (shift + left click) at one time. Then when you are done hit clear and you can go somewhere else and when hand painting a beach can do another max of 256 points before you have to hit clear and go paint another beach?

[hitech]

In regards to hand painting beaches Greebo what does this actually mean?

Does it mean:

A) There can only be 256 points for the total map?

or

B) Does it mean while you are actually drawing that you can only put down 256 max beach points (shift + left click) at one time. Then when you are done hit clear and you can go somewhere else and when hand painting a beach can do another max of 256 points before you have to hit clear and go paint another beach?

B.

HiTech

[ghostdancer]

Great to hear HiTech otherwise the Pacific maps were going to be ...  .

[ghostdancer]

So I loaded up AH3 TE and converted one of my Pacific terrain which went rather smoothly (although it butchered the coastlines) except for this error which is the majority errors.

1) When a ran a check on errors I got "square objects touch each other." This seems to be caused by have a town in one square and the airfield in the adjacent square. Not an issue at all in AH2 but for some reason it is here. The reason the town and field are in adjacent squares is simply because on some pacific islands there is really no other choice since they are so small.

[ghostdancer]

Never find I found a thread on the subject I was looking for in regards to lakes.

[Greebo]

1) When a ran a check on errors I got "square objects touch each other." This seems to be caused by have a town in one square and the airfield in the adjacent square. Not an issue at all in AH2 but for some reason it is here. The reason the town and field are in adjacent squares is simply because on some pacific islands there is really no other choice since they are so small.

One reason this can be a problem on terrains is that it can cause holes that players could drop through. Even if you make both the airfield and the town the same height in properties that does not mean the rims of each object will have the same height where they touch. The TE normally adjusts the height of the terrain to blend with each object automatically but it cannot do this if there is another object of a different height touching it and this can create a vertical gap in the terrain.

On the ETO terrain set the town object's rim is 30 ft higher than its properties alt while the 1 mile square airfields are at the same alt. Most of the strat objects, TT and the 4 mile square airfield vary from 0 to +30 feet difference. The exceptions to this are the 1 mile V base, whose rim is 150 feet higher and the 2 mile V base which is 160 feet higher. It is important to bear this in mind when placing these bases in the terrain otherwise you can end up with a steep 160 foot incline around the whole periphery of the base.

[ghostdancer]

Understood Greebo but this seems an issue with the way the default AH2 were built since we did not have the same issue with the shapes in AH2. While it doesn't affect the ETO terrains it definitely causes an headaches with PTO historical terrains where at times you simply don't have a lot of land to work with.

Will have to think on how to address this drawback.

[Greebo]

I was was about to suggest you could create a two mile by one mile airfield/town object but that got me thinking, do square tile objects have to be square or can they also be rectangular?                         

[ghostdancer]

No idea, I never did any object editing / creating work back in AH2 (that was Midi) and usually just relied on the standard included shapes. Which why I was sort of surprised to see that the new standard town has issues with the standard airfields.

[Greebo]

Could you just get rid of the town and use a map room object for the airfield capture instead?