User:Wolfsbane/Sandbox

Creating a Wilderness Map

Terrain Generation

Unlike race tracks, the whole area is important. Players will be able to go everywhere, so we need to make sure there's something interesting in every direction. The first thing to do is to look at other maps in the area, try and work out how they were created.

I'll be using an empty map to demonstrate these transformations. The sun has been turned down to reduce glare, and fog is reduced.

Green outline - terrain repeats. Can change size of area.

Terrain terraform editor mode. Two types of transformation - generators and modifiers. They work in order from top to bottom, and can be layered to produce complex effects.

Generators

Generators override the terrain, and wipe out everything above them in the stack. No point using more than one of these. The "New Seed" button gives a different random terrain. The green minimap in the bottom left shows a preview of the terrain that will be generated.

• fBm Fractal - basic hilly terrain. Hill frequency is (more or less) the number of hills in the area. Roughness is the steepness of the hills (I think - it doesn't actually seem to do much). Detail adds smaller hills between the large ones. This is the most useful generator for most areas.

• Rigid MultiFractal - produces ridges or sand dunes. This is used for most of the terrain along the SS-Elms route. Frequency and detail as above.

• Canyon Fractal - Produces steep-sided canyons. Think of Sarsfield, or The Maze. Chaos adjusts how winding the canyons are. With low numbers of canyons and moderate roughness, this can produce rolling hills.

Low Chaos

High Chaos

• Sinus - produces small bumps all over the map. The graph will be important for a lot of operations, so it's worth explaining how it works. The height of the graph shows how much of that size effect will be part of the final terrain - large bumps on the left, small ones on the right. A couple of examples:

Small Ripples

Large Ripples

Varied Ripples

• Bitmap - claims to use an 8 bit bitmap as the base for a terrain. Unfortunately I can't work out which folder it looks in for bitmaps. Anyone who works it out, let me know.

Modifiers

• General - sets max and min terrain height. This is the biggest effect on the "hilliness" of the terrain. This is always the first transformation, and can't be deleted.

• Turbulence - adds extra noise and roughness to the terrain. It gives a twisting sort of effect. Requires clicking on a higher level and back before seeing any effects.

No Turbulence

Light Turbulence

Heavy Turbulence

• Smoothing - the opposite. Smooths out rough edges and makes a more even, rolling terrain. Number of iterations has the biggest effect on the outcome.

No Smoothing

Light Smoothing

Heavy Smoothing

• Smooth Ridges/Valleys - smooths only the top of mountains and ridges. Useful to avoid sharp peaks that cars have trouble driving over.

No Smoothing

Heavy Smoothing

• Filter - applies a transform based on the height of the terrain - each input height can be linked to an output. There are all sort of complex effects that can be achieved like this, although I haven't experimented much.

The original terrain

Filtering used to set the terrain to three levels

• Thermal Erosion/Hydraulic Erosion - don't appear to do anything. Let me know if you work it out.

Automatic Texture Generation

Painting the whole map by hand would be slow and impractical, so unless we just want uniform sand we need to automatically paint textures. This is more art than science. I've managed to get it to work, more or less, but I'm not sure exactly what the rules are.

Use the add material button to add textures to your level. They come with a standard fractal distortion, just to add a bit of roughness to the edges and make the whole thing appear a little more natural. There are two additional placement options:

• Place by Height - Good for putting rock textures on the tops of hills, or underwater textures at the bottom of pools. Here's a quick example:

You can see that the sand is restricted to the middle layer, with red sand at the bottom of pits and black rock at the top of the hills.

• Place by Slope - Best used in combination with place by height. In this example, the black rock has been set to large slopes only, so the plateau on top reverts to the yellow sand.