Hold down on the s key to raise yourself up from the water when you are first in the editor. As you do that use the wheel on your mouse to speed it up or slow it down. It will then effect every other movement key.
Also place your mouse on your clip board map you created in the map window and drag the red square around on the terrain. If you have not created one, from file pick make map and hit ok. Click save then exit. Find map.bmp in your project folder and copy it to the texstrc folder. Rename the map.bmp to terrainname.bmp and reopen the terrain editor. If you have given your project a name longer than 8 characters or used capitol letters, it won't open for you offline when you run a build after placing at least one field on the terrain to loginto. Constantly create new maps as you build the terrain so you can see your work in progress. You can edit a map file and paint cut lines or ridge lines or a new island or water runoff canyon locations you want to put in your terrain. Then you can open the terrain editor and see those and use them as cutting guides or building guides. Create a blank map. paint in all of your gross land foundation and then use the elevation tool to trace them. Or get a copy of L3DT or make your own heightmap files to import like I do from a multi layer art file converted to 16bit grayscale. I think I've documented that in one or all three of my project posts.
If you do not have a copy, please PM Esayscor for a copy of the updated terrain editor manual
Easyscor and Greebo so graciously updated for everyone. It will get you through all of this, the artistic things and patience are on you.....
This is nothing compared to cutting a 32 point brilliant stone. I get burnt doing highly repetitious mountain ranges over weeks, or creatively agonizing over how to make topographical transitions between large features and elevations that resemble the real world. And then I get burnt doing micro features at 30, 40, 100+ spawn areas that each have to be tested with a tank and make sense for MA style GV combat.
If you want to be fair to the community, spend time listening to range for how players are utilizing terrains and problems they discuss between friends with driving through features. Read the whizzing contests in the forums for nuggets of insight to how the whizzers are using the terrain, not for what their fantasy's would be if they could force Hitech to do them. Then test, test, test, (you get the point here) all of your ideas and assumptions on a test terrain for GV combat micro terrain. Air combat guys just need a flat place with an airfield, while it's gratis for them as they climb up that your arena looks within reason like the real world.
Here is the single biggest mistake everyone probably makes from time to time. SCALE
The smallest brush size is about 100ft in diameter so the smallest topographical feature you can make is 100ft wide x 100ft high. In the terrain editor you will generally keep an eyeball view between 10-20kft above your work. If you don't constantly check elevations and remember how big the smallest building block of the polygon mesh is. From 10-20k feet up it will look reasonable to build truly detailed topographical formations for a 2000ft tall player. Then when you lay down a field so you can look at your master piece under construction offline in a tank. You will wonder how all of your low mountains and hilly landscape morphed into Mount Everest and the Himalayas. You lost your point of perspective and bearings for what the real scale in the arena is for your GV. Aside from creating Mt. Everest in detail to scale, a 500ft slope with runoff canyons will never look good up close because of the size of the polygons in the project polygon mesh work space. You use the clutter tiles to artfully adjust the look with grass, bushes and trees and a lot of driving around to see if it even makes sense. CM-eye mode is wonderful for rapidly moving around offline during a project looking for topo boo boos. It cannot replace driving out in a tank and asking yourself, self!!!, does this make sense or do we do it over? Be prepared to do over and loose a week or a month of work if you are honest with your self. It does not take long to wipe out some work and put new building blocks back in and do over once you accept it's part of the job. Often what you put back in will be better because of what you learned putting the first round in and you will have better ideas from that experience. Oh, and you will find at times you will discover a better way to do something that looks really good, yes if it looks better than all of that feature type you did on the terrain up to this point, update them also. You always learn through repetition and familiarity along with streamlining processes in the terrain editor. So far it's been I get down to the last major feature on a terrain and have a painting or structure and technique epiphany. Then I revisit the whole dang thing to standardize the look where I had hoped my testing terrain would save me this.
Other than that, contact Easyscor to get the manual.
