I started working on a new map, and I decided it was too boring to texture a large map by hand. Since this was a forest map, all I wanted was to adjust the terrain for riverbanks, riverbeds and mountains. Since I am a programmer I get easily bored with repetitious tasks, and I decided to make the editor do the automated part.
Now the paint tool can also use a set of terrain to paint. For example if I paint the map with Jungle-set, the game automatically draws all slopes with the specified slope texture, adjusts the texture accordingly when we get to higher ground, and makes the sea blue and adds the beach texture to shorelines. I can of course force a texture like previously, so this new tool is just meant to help a modder get started.
I also wanted to add these fancy red squares! The game will now automatically block walking too steep slopes, and the red squares show where the terrain is blocked by the water or a slope. (Edit) And I forgot to mention the squares are only visible in the editor. In the game itself the slopes will be marked with rocky textures.
Wait a moment… You can’t walk into them?
That’s right. It’s only visible in the editor to show you where the player cannot go. For the player I’m going to add some other visible clue to see which slopes are too steep to climb.
Two questions: Is it possible to disable this if necessary and do the edges get smoothed? Otherwise oh god yes this is gonna save so much work.
being able to jump down from the cliff in to the water but not being able to climb back up!
nothing st00pid like invisible walls. make the water filled with deadly alien fish that instantly eats anything that gets in too deep
To me this should be a huge time saver, since I need to do a lot of nature maps. It won’t be very useful if you don’t have any changes in the terrain height, such as the case would be in a city or a spaceship.
The terrain set can be painted just like a normal texture, it just automatically selects the texture based on the height. So it can be overridden easily. For the terrain system the texture edges are always smooth no matter what. That too can be prevented by using a flat object.
At the moment it’s not possible to disable the automatic slope walking prevention, but if I get any good reasons to do so in Driftmoon I’ll implement it.
Swimming is not planned for the moment. I’ve always wanted it, but it’s not important to the gameplay so I’m leaving it out until I get the time to implement it properly.