Creating Outdoor Maps

dareddragonj5

I recently started making an outdoor map and a few things had me a bit frustrated. Not sure if there are ways around this as I am new to the Foundry. If you know of any, please feel free to educate me.

1. Editing Terrain - While pre-detailed maps come with trenches and hills, it doesn't appear you can create these things yourself. It would be nice to be able to edit the ground making it deeper or higher creating the ground as you wish. In the Jurassic Park Sim, you were able to do this with a tool that hovered over an area of terrain and either heightened, lowered, or flattened when creating your park. Also changing the look of the ground such as grass, dirt, trail, and so on.

2. Point of view in 3D - When editing in 3D it would be nice to have a God view rather than be stuck at the point of view of the character. In the least, when I drag an object to the edge of the screen, it would be nice if the camera rotated. Is there any way to rotate it rather than having to stop moving the object, turn my character and then continue moving it.

3. Water direction - No matter where I face my water squares, the water flows in one direction. Is there a way to make it flow in another? I figured rotating it would do the trick but it doesn't appear to have an effect.

If anyone has any answers or workarounds, that would be cool. Otherwise, it would be nice to see these things addressed.

tilt42

I don't have much to contribute since these things appear to need dev intervention (and the first one probably needs an expansion-sized patch to the game), but I do want to point out that your choice of text color (red on dark red) is almost impossible to read and hurts the eyes. I had to highlight your text to read it.

dareddragonj5

tilt42 wrote: »

I don't have much to contribute since these things appear to need dev intervention (and the first one probably needs an expansion-sized patch to the game), but I do want to point out that your choice of text color (red on dark red) is almost impossible to read and hurts the eyes. I had to highlight your text to read it.

Thanks and also apologies. The red shows up quite bright on my system. Didn't consider how it would look to others. I'll keep it plain. Anyway, fingers crossed come next big patch.

fyrestorme1

dareddragonj5 wrote: »

I recently started making an outdoor map and a few things had me a bit frustrated. Not sure if there are ways around this as I am new to the Foundry. If you know of any, please feel free to educate me.

1. Editing Terrain - While pre-detailed maps come with trenches and hills, it doesn't appear you can create these things yourself. It would be nice to be able to edit the ground making it deeper or higher creating the ground as you wish. In the Jurassic Park Sim, you were able to do this with a tool that hovered over an area of terrain and either heightened, lowered, or flattened when creating your park. Also changing the look of the ground such as grass, dirt, trail, and so on.

2. Point of view in 3D - When editing in 3D it would be nice to have a God view rather than be stuck at the point of view of the character. In the least, when I drag an object to the edge of the screen, it would be nice if the camera rotated. Is there any way to rotate it rather than having to stop moving the object, turn my character and then continue moving it.

3. Water direction - No matter where I face my water squares, the water flows in one direction. Is there a way to make it flow in another? I figured rotating it would do the trick but it doesn't appear to have an effect.

If anyone has any answers or workarounds, that would be cool. Otherwise, it would be nice to see these things addressed.

please, PLEASE don't use dark red on a dark brownish red background

dark0v

1. Apparently Cryptic want to do terrain editing, but no idea when or if it will happen. It is a big thing for me too, for now though I plan to get around it by minimising the overland areas within my quests.

2. I'd love to move camera controls for the "Play" mode, I find it much easier to produce good results using it than the standard top-down map editor.

3. Not tried water, can't help you there.

kamaliicious

1) You can't.
2) Nope.
3) You can't.

myrkolith

To answer this for you as I have spent a lot of time building and working on ways to get around limitations etc. The 3D edit there really isn't a way to do it, the only thing you can do because they added that editing slider is stand farther back from what you are moving and crank the edit slider all the way to max. What this does is it sets how far away you can see and click on the editing markers on your objects. So if you want to move a large wall for example, get way back from it and then point and click it and move it from there where you need it.

For the Ground decals, there are actually decals such as dirt or snow, but they are quite small and would take a lot of resources in order to use them to cover an area, but for smaller outdoor maps or specific areas of sand they do work. Look under the effects section with no specific category as I forget which they fall under. It's either effects or decals.

For the terrain issue, the only way I have found to actually make hills or different levels to my terrain for outdoors is to basically take large mountains, and bury them partially. Like for example set the Y ratio to -34 feet on a 36ish foot mountain so only the top portions are sticking out of the ground. This way you can add some actual variances as needed.

Hope that helps...

EDIT -- Oh and about burying the mountains, you can set the priority of the terrain in your editor to make it easier to see so for example after you have your mountains placed the way you want, make them all the lowest priority and then anything else you place will go over top of them.

dareddragonj5

Thanks everyone for the feedback, and again I apologize about the dark red on brown. Shows up fine for me, but not everyone apparently. I appreciate the suggestions and feedback. Despite some of these setbacks I am still having a lot of fun with this.