Finally, my terrain editor has reached a more or less bug-free alpha state…
For all of you, who do not like EasyGen and are tired of creating their terrain meshes triangle by triangle in GtkRadiant: Give FATE (Freehand Adaptive Terrain Editor) a try and tell me what you think of it please
This is an early alpha release… so, please do not instantly kill me if something does not work the way you expected For a list of features please have a look at the website mentioned above.
And here are some teasers:
A screenshot of the editor.
Some simple terrain I created with a few easy clicks and movements and 3 textures I downloaded from Sock’s Simland. You might notice the distortionless placement of the textures… all handled by FATE for your relief
So far I’ve just been playing around with it a little and I really like it so far. The ways you can manipulate the terrain and the implementation of the interface is spot on! Easy to use and still very powerfull, especially impressed with the gadget and the geometry selection tool.
Very Good work! Will keep my eyes on this project for things you will implement next…
edit:
Found a silly bug. Well I don’t know why I did it but if you have the gadget activated (not in right-click mode) and press ctrl + mouse wheel scroll it crash the program.
For all of you, who do not like EasyGen and are tired of creating their terrain meshes triangle by triangle in GtkRadiant
yes u read my mind
with this tool it looks like i could have made the map i am working on right now in a fraction of the time
great work congrats
the only thing that i would see as an improvemnt is if smeone build something like this as a plugin to GTK so it was easy to manipulate terrain as the map progressed not havin to faf around import/export
oh yeah and one more thing to mention. since it calims to bo of unlimited size and you can get such nice shapes it seems like it would be very good to make ETQW maps with when the time comes. Any plants to suport mega textures in the future?
Nice hill, and the app itself seems appealing. I’m going to try it this evening, I’ll see if I can take my current terrain from Easygen by a heightmap.
(BTW: Does that hill use dotproduct2 blending? And is this program smart enough to write such shaders on itself?)
I used it some time… And this program results from well spent programming time!
However I was unable to port my work from Easygen due to the lack of an ‘import heightmap’ feature, this program still kicks ass.
It is nice to see another approach on terrain building with a program, as Easygen and GTKGenSurf only generate x and y grids.
My wishlist of features: (in order)
-Heightmap import/export. (However import only could do, as I can export my map directly)
-Smooth tool (To get rid of those few ‘jagged’ edges)
-Some texture stuff working (Eventually you just color the tris with gradients to show what shader is on them)
-Height ‘replace’ function or a “flattening” tool (This is an easygen function I sometimes use to quickly make small paths running on a sloped hill)
(Allso note this last tool could be a custom plugin)
Of course, this is a wishlist, and I hope you keep improving this program is would be quite usefull for the Doom3 engine as well. (The new ‘megatexture’ system not considered yet, that may work differently)
Got it to work. No screens atm. Will work more with this tool tomorrow.
I’m impressed by FATE although it is an alpha version yet.
I get the same bug as reported above by lanz:
Ctrl + mousewheelscrollup (or mousewheelscrolldown) when the gadget is activated (not in right-click mode) = crash.
Thanks a lot for all the kind words and the nice feedback! It is much appreciated!
@Lanz: Oops, I knew that I have forgotten an “if” somewhere I will fix that…
@carnage: I hope to be able to provide map or bsp import in one of the upcoming versions… I hope that helps a little to achieve proper placement of the hills and valleys.
I didn’t think about mega textures yet… TBH I am still fighting with myself what is the best (i.e. easiest) and at the same time flexible way to texture terrain. Therefore no “real” texture support in this release If everything goes like I planned, the texturing capabilities might be quite powerful.
@kamikazee: I will see, what I can do about the heightmap import… however, the result might be somewhat inaccurate due to the hexagonal mesh structure… we will see. ATM the program creates an experimental bunch of shaders for you (using dotproduct2 and alpha volumes). I am still optimizing them, so they might not fit your needs. Additionally 3 textures will be created (red, green, and blue unichrome)… feel free to replace them with your own images… that’s what I did to get that hill you can see above. Once there are some textures in place, the application won’t overwrite them with the next export. Also see FAQ #2 on the web site…
Mesh smoothing is already on my schedule… (once again, see web site … or the “Optimize” dialog)
Regarding a flattening tool: I’ll see, what I can do, part 2
… and now, back to work…
BTW: I will be offline starting from tomorrow evening until next saturday… so please bear with me, if I am not answering… thanks
just had another qucik play with the tool, i think i gettin the hang of it a bitt better now. i think the key is to take a lot of time to sculpt very carfuly but the end results are much worth it
thanx to the new trangluar mesh and much smaller divides terrain realy does look much more natural. particuly for smaller hills and sections that were very time consuming to make before
the tool imo is good enough to start making maps with now if only there was a blur tool present. any chance of a release soon with such a tool
What exactly do you mean by “blur tool”? Something that smoothes the edges or something to blur the straight (=unnatural) alignment of the triangles, i.e. a tool to add some jitter or Perlin noise? Or none of these?
Can you import blocks of caulk or placeholders into your tool? I’d love to be able to create a .map in Radiant, which consists of block placeholders (key buildings, etc), see it in FATE, then sculpt terrain around it.
as for blur i would like something that smooth traiangles so you could use it smooth unatural traingles. it seems when this occours there isnt much that can be done about it
in the CandC editor wich is pretty similar to this you could set it places a blur tool where you raised hills and things automaticaly to avaoid getting these kind of edges in the first place
2 tools i would realy like to see would be
-raise triangles to and exact height so its posible to create flat smooth planes where things like road decal could be placed
-the ability to lock triangles so when you have carved a road network out or whatever you can build hills around it without worrying about messing it up
The first tool you’re pointing to is allmost possible using the square deformation function and a flattening tool. Of course the last one is the thing we’re missing…
-The 2nd is a nice thought, I’ve cursed many times when trying to create little paths using Easygen.
-About the smooth tool: maybe you could make a geometry editing tool of it, which only smooths the selected polygons. (Ok, this will take quite some calculation, combined with the deformation functions)
If you later want to add a ‘whole terrain smooth’, you could simply use this tool behind the scenes for the whole terrain.
-I allso noticed the ‘deformation amplitude’ spinner (or how do you call such a thing again) goes quite slow, maybe it should have a greater step value? (Say about the edge’s length / 2)
That way, you click the ‘down’ button a few times to select 1 row of triangles less instead of pressing it for a while or entering values manually.
A few notes on the heightmap stuff though: (once you take the time for it, choose your priorities)
-Easygen allways chooses the new terrain’s dimensions after heightmap import, which is quite annoying.
It should import the heightmap, ask for the height balance and then import to the current terrain by overwriting it (ask for confirmation there) or it should ask the dimensions of the new terrain. If you’re working on this feature, you could pay attention to it.
-One way to get a heightmap imported in this structure is to “virtually” stretch the heightmap image over the terrain. Each pixel will then form a square, and all vertexes in this square will be set to the height of the square’s gray value. After the import, the user is taken to the optimize menu where he can do a ‘global smooth’. Depending on the smooth function’s implementation, this can allso avoid stretching of images as seen on steep hills created with easygen (or any other x,y grid) just by spreading the ‘edge lengths’.
Ok, it’s insane to ask that this stuff should make it into the next release. (especially the heightmap stuff)
I wouldn’t bother if the smooth and heightmap functions are postponed to some later release, getting base editing and limited texturing done is allready good enough to create complete maps. And still then .map import has a little higher priority then the heightmap import as I could allso export my terrain from Easygen and recreate the terrain from the .map file. (The terrain would look waay smoother)
Ok, this post was long enough, I’ll stop bothering you till next release or if I found a bug.
new trangluar mesh and much smaller divides terrain realy does look much more natural
= tons of tris, so be careful when creating the larger outdoor maps
From the screenies I m not happy with the mesh because with the old cube-split-diagonally-mesh you could easily cut triangles and adjust them to your brushwork/ have different triangle-sizes in your map according to your needs. This will be a lot more difficult to acchieve with this honeycomb-pattern imo, but i ll try it out anyways.
I ll have a look at it tonight, but I think it will be a real substitute for EasyGen only when it features .map-import and then exports the terrain as brushes. You really need that to adapt the terrain to your brushwork.
For a list of features please have a look at the website mentioned above.
If everything goes like I planned, the texturing capabilities might be quite powerful.
