I have only one gripe: my laptop's maximum res is 1280x800 so I couldn't see the bottom buttons eg. Cliff7 etc. (particularly with my double sized toolbar).

But other than that, it's looking pretty damn good I must say - nice work :)

Heh, sorry about that. I can fix it up this week to grab configuration from a file so you can tweak the screen resolution settings. I got a new 20" widescreen, so I tend to forget what it was like before...

Alright, I decided to hack in some configuration settings code I was working on quite some time ago, and it seems to work. It's code I haven't even thought about in over a year, though, so I can't be sure... [grin] At any rate, there is now a file called gamesettings.txt. You can open the file and edit the settings strings for screen_width and screen_height. Preserve the file structure, it's actually parsed by the script environment and I'm not really sure what happens if the engine doesn't find screen_width and screen_height, or if they're not sane. I might want to dig in that old code and find out...

Anyway, the fixed version is uploaded.

Heh, *much* better, thank you :)

Your app was a lot of fun - so fun in fact that I didn't get any of the work done that I had planned to do on my own project tonight. Curse you! :)

A few things I noticed:

* If you brush on a layer (eg. LAVA - Blend 7), and then want to brush a lower layer over it (eg. Blend 2), you get no result. I think it's because you only increase the opacity per-vert at the lower layer, but the upper layer is still drawn on top of it at it's original opacity. So a subtractive brush would probably be good for those scenarios.

* When executing Script0 and then trying to edit the landscape, the bumps still stay there even though the terrain is directly editted to be at a particular level. Is that deliberate? It confused me for a while :)

And a few usability things that are very specific to me. Though I thought I'd voice them anyway...

* The minimap is cool, I found myself trying to click myself around the map by using it though :)

* I found myself wanting to zoom out to get a better view. Particularly when making cliffs or high-areas, the screen real-estate is reduced and is a bit of a pain to edit. Although this could also be because the cursor seems to be projected onto the ground=0 layer to get the map coordinate being edited. :)

Quote: Original post by FReY
Heh, *much* better, thank you :)

Your app was a lot of fun - so fun in fact that I didn't get any of the work done that I had planned to do on my own project tonight. Curse you! :)

Hehe, sorry. :D

Quote:

A few things I noticed:

* If you brush on a layer (eg. LAVA - Blend 7), and then want to brush a lower layer over it (eg. Blend 2), you get no result. I think it's because you only increase the opacity per-vert at the lower layer, but the upper layer is still drawn on top of it at it's original opacity. So a subtractive brush would probably be good for those scenarios.

Yeah, that is an effect of it being layered. I draw the terrain in passes, one over another. I do have plans to add erase brushes, I'm still not entirely certain exactly how I want to go about doing it, whether erase should be a separate tool, part of the terrain brush as you described, or both. And not sure exactly how it would work. Kind of think about a 'reverse' fade, the opposite of what it does now. Maybe I'll play with it tomorrow.

Quote:

* When executing Script0 and then trying to edit the landscape, the bumps still stay there even though the terrain is directly editted to be at a particular level. Is that deliberate? It confused me for a while :)

That is delibirate. I do 2 separate maps, 1 for the surface noise. Otherwise, as terrain grows up to the height specified by the brush, the surface noise would disappear and you would have smooth hills again. The two noise maps are added together before being uploaded to the level structure. It's mostly a cosmetic thing, and it would be just as simple to edit the map first, then apply the surface noise to the finished map when you are done. I just kind of like it this way.

Quote:

And a few usability things that are very specific to me. Though I thought I'd voice them anyway...

* The minimap is cool, I found myself trying to click myself around the map by using it though :)

Yeah, me too actually. It is something I may end up implementing just to keep from frustrating myself.

Quote:

* I found myself wanting to zoom out to get a better view. Particularly when making cliffs or high-areas, the screen real-estate is reduced and is a bit of a pain to edit. Although this could also be because the cursor seems to be projected onto the ground=0 layer to get the map coordinate being edited. :)

I deliberately chose to do intersections with y=0 rather than with the elevated terrain because I personally find it more intuitive. The loss of screen real-estate is annoying. There is some (undocumented) functionality to change the camera height, but it is still buggy as hell and slow, as some things need to be recomputed. I may try to fix the bugs, then precompute as much as I can for the entire range of possible camera heights at startup, though that might increase an already slow startup time quite a bit. This is something that's been on the todo list for awhile. I could bump the default camera height up just a bit, lower the camera angle to show a broader swathe of terrain, or both... Or perhaps allow these parameters to be specified in configuration as well.

On an unrelated note, to make things a little simpler to save and restore between sessions, I implemented builder:loadRawMap() and builder:dumpRawMap() to dump the elevation buffer and the top 7 blend buffers to a file and reload them again. Not quite as easy as a file dialog, but it works. It also works better than exporting to a crapload of TGA files, since you don't lose the precision from casting to unsigned char.

I also fixed some interpolation bugs in the float array class's rasterTriangleTex() function. I accidentally compiled against an old, buggy version that had some triangle edges interpolating incorrectly. I also had the RTM_Blend mode implemented backwards from what I intended, so that is fixed now.

I'm going to keep hacking on it to get the bugs ironed out. Glad you like it, though, and if you have any more suggestions or problems, let me know and I'll see about fixing some of them, time and interest allowing. [grin]

=D