I don’t mean to trouble you veterans with noob design questions, but any advice would help : :eek3: )
1: When designing a level with terrains, is it easier to outline the majority of the level with your buildings and structures and then create your terrains? Or do you generally create your terrains and then work at structure/building placement?
2: When laying your terrains do you create one huge terrain map, or do you create sections and combine them? I was looking at the easygen program and it limits you at 33x33 pixels which seems rather small to me.
Lastly, does Radiant have any guides? I’m very familiar with photoshop and macormedia’s Flash-mx and they have user guides you can place so you can snap objects more easily/precisely.
I generally get all my buildings drawn out on a map the same size and import them to easygen before removing the required brushes I would have struggled with the alpha map otherwise
I made a map of 42 by 84 pixels and it worked fine (eventually but that was just me)
Remember I’m a noob too so don’t always take my advice as been the best there is
I’m new to this map making stuff to
I decided to make Autocad->Map exporter. I want to draw terrain in autocad and then exported to *.map file. So I can continue working on a map in radiant.
Now I have a problem. I made a simple hollow room in radiant. Saved the file. And imported to autocad. In autocad are only triangles.
Can some one thell me if this thinking is correct: triangles only represent small surfaces. So I must extend this triangles basicly to infinity and search for intersection. And that way I get the true shape of the brush. I do this for every brush in map file. Is this true?
You should aviod cutting up your terrain to make your building fit, and you should also try not to overlap it with the terrain brushes. This means that if your terrain divisions are 256 game units, you should make your buildings multiples of this, and delete the terrain brushes which are under your buildings.
I would recommend always keeping snap-to-grid on in radiant.
The terrain manual that comes with radiant is a good resource. It is written for gensurf (a radiant plug in, somewhat more primitive than easygen). Still, reading it will tell you a lot about how terrain really works.
I don’t know why easygen would limit you to 33x33, you can go quite a bit bigger than that. Perhaps it is a setting somewhere. Do be aware that the the number of brushes goes up rapidly, and you eventually start running into compiler limits.
well I read a tutorial that said you can only use a 33x33 pixel alpha map. If I could just make on huge terrian map that would be great. Or I was thinking I could always design a huge terrain map and spilt it up later into smaller sections. I guess the real question is does anyone know what the grid-pixel ratio is? I guess I need to sit down and spend a few hours fiddling with the program, but this could save me some time I figured. Thanks for any and all replies
you can have bigger bitmaps but 33x33 but you always have to watch your tris-numbers…
terrain is detail by default and should stay detail, this means if you make a complete terrain map without any high walls (reaching from bottom to top of the map) you will get serious performance problems, try to do your map as a combination of several (big) rooms and place parts of terrain in each “room” … this doesn’t make it clear does it? will have a look if i can find a decent tutorial on that…
assuming a 3333 bitmap every (bitmap-)pixel stands for one “terrain-unit” so we have 32 of these units, each consisting of 2 tris, that makes 322 = 64 -> 64*64 = 4096 tris
in easygen you can then set a division width: the division width is the size that everyone of our terrain units has,
assume a value of 128, so we have 128 * 32 units = 4096 units in width and height in radiant
errm - getting confused now myself, somebody correct me if that was wrong
I understand that there could be performance issues with large area of terrain. I’m constructing a level similiar to gold rush and part of the level is elevated and slowly slopes downward over time. Plus I need mountains to act as a type of barrier in some sections. Thus, another question I have is if I have a mountainous terrain that blocks a portion of the map from the player does this help performance. For example, if I put a mountain terrian all around a building will the the distance draw decrease because the players view is blocked or does the game try and draw objects in the distance even if they are blocked from player view?
btw EasyGen doesnt limit you to 33x33, you can modify this settings to whatever you want asap you start easygen from the Grid tab (on the left): enter your numbers then press the Apply button…
Or if you want to start from an heightmap (bmp) to import, make your bmp with PaintShopPro/Photoshop/Paint of the size you want (33x33, 43x43, 33x49, etc etc) then import it in EasyGen (file->import->heightmap) or in Gensurf
EDIT: I made a mistake, the dimensions of the hieghtmap must be odd numbers so that the divisions on the terrain mesh will be even (33x33 heightmap -> 32x32 terrain)
There’s still one thing I don’t understand, say that I’m creating my terrain with EasyGen. Everything is as I wanted, but in radiant I saw that a slope was missing. Do I have to start all over with EasyGen? Creating a very large terrain with only a bitmap is a bitch, creating a small terrain with that is easy.
Having a good idea of the buildings for which you will be placing is the first step. Thinking about the detail you will put into these buidings, surrounding detail, etc will help you determine the shape of your terrain as it pertains to VIS blocking and performance issues. Once you have all this as a design guidline you can start building your terrain to accomodate what you want to achieve.
In this way, you aren’t necessarily molding your terrain around your buildings, but you have set out some goals that you will design towards. For example, you may now know that you will have 3 buildings, a bunch of trees, some fencing, telegraph poles, and rocks in a valley area so you need to plan around that AMOUNT of detail, not the exact placement of the detail, as such.
In real life, buildings and terrain share different relationships. Most often, the terrain dictates where buildings and roads will lie. A road might have to flow around a mountain side or a river. With modern machinery, man is able to push dirt aside to lay down roads or dig roadside ditches, basements, etc. So on the large scale, terrain dictates buildings and on the small scale, buildings dicate the surrounding dirt
a) you can add/remove/edit whatever you want from Radiant once you’ve exported the terrain from EasyGen to a Radiant map file. But… you must be very careful when you do a group/regroup of the terrain entity. if you destroy the entity I think you will lose the keys (“terrain”, “shader”, “alphamap”, …) because they point to resources (files or shader names) that are needed by q3mapx to compile the terrain entity. To make it short, as usual, if you want to use EasyGen you should give a read at leats once at the terrain manual to understand how the terrain engine works.
If you only want to raise/lower a vertex there are no problems. If you want to remove a brush there are no problems. if you want to add a brush someone else can help you because they know more tricks than me
b) you may want to do all the work from EasyGen (file->save to save your project and re-opne it later… just as any other program does) and then every time you modify something you delete the terrain entity from the map file you’re working on and re-export into it from EasyGen the newly modified terrain.
