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TerrainOverview
Here's a quick summary of the things to see and do in the General tabs.
The editor is a basic 3D camera. Move the camera around with WASD and aim by holding the middle mouse button. Movement speed increases the longer you move without stopping, as well as when you hold the Shift key to "run." Reset the camera with the icon in the lower left.
Create a new terrain. You get to specify:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Width, Height | The width and the height (from 16x16 to 5400x5400) |
| Generate Noise | Initialize a terrain with noise, rather than a flat sheet |
| Noise Scale | The amplitude of said noise |
| Noise Smoothness | The smoothness of said noise (smoother takes longer to generate) |
| Import Heightmap | You may select a heightmap image to import (black and white) |
| Heightmap Scale | The elevation scale of the heightmap |
Largeer terrains will obviously be a bit more demanding, and some might argue don't actually contribute much to the game as a whole.
Save your work, in the unlikely event that you might want to come back to it later.
There are quite a few export options, detailed here.
You can save a heightmap, similar to the one you can import via the New Terrain dialog. You can also save a data buffer containing the raw height data (column-major), which you might find useful for things such as terrain collision data.
You can import your own brush images for editing. The defaults are totally not just the stock GameMaker particle images with a few additions of my own.
There are a number of view options that you can fiddle with in the editor.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Draw Water | Draw the water |
| Water Level | How high or low the water is; this will obviously be ignored if the water is disabled |
| Wireframe alpha | The brightness of the wireframe drawn on the terrain; setting this to 0 will disable it |
| Cursor alpha | The brightness of the cursor on the terrain; setting this to 0 will disable it |
| Draw Axes | Draw the 3D coordinate system axes at the world origin |
| Draw Skybox | Draw the skybox (I think it's nice but some might find it annoying) |
| View Distance | Past this threshold the terrain will render at a lower level of detail; lowering this is useful if you're editing a large-ish terrain and finding editor performance to be poor |
| View Data | Render the diffuse color (i.e. the terrain's actual textured and painted color), the 3D position of the terrain as if it was a 1x1x1 cube, the face normals of the terrain, the elevation of the terrain, and the barycentric coordinates of each triangle in the terrain, which is functionally useless but looks kinda cool |
| Draw Fog | Draw pixel fog on the terrain |
| Fog Start | The distance at which pixel fog begins to appear |
| Fog End | The distance at which pixel fog is fully opaque |
| Fog Color | The color of the pixel fog; pixel fog itself is NOT an optimization (and please, please stop telling people that it is), but setting the fog color to black and disabling water and the skybox can make it easier to mask where the LOD versions of terrain are transitioned to |
Outside of the Viewer Settings panel there are a few other options that I thought might be annoying to have to constantly go into the menu to access.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Orthographic View | Enabling this will draw the terrain through a 2D, overhead camera instead of a free 3D perspective camera. This can be useful when trying to make small, precise edits, especially when painting color or texture |
| RNG seed | I honestly don't think setting your own RNG seed is super useful I've been on the Internet for long enough to know that statistically some of you will get a kick out of generating terrain using the string butts or something |
Look I just think these are cool okay?
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Chunks (Full) | The number of full detail chunks rendered |
| Chunks (Reduced) | The number of low level of detail (LOD) chunks rendered |
| Triangles | The number of triangles rendered; each cell in the terrain is two triangles |
| Terrain Area | Assuming each cell in the terrain is one square meter |
| Baseball Diamonds | The number of baseball diamonds that could fit in your terrain; this only counts the area contained within the base paths and not the total area of the infield dirt, which sounds like gross math that I don't feel like calculating, or the total playable area of a baseball field, since the standards for that are all over the place |
| Vatican Cities | Vatican City in Rome is where the Pope lives; this number tells you how many of those could fit in your terrain |
| Barringer Craters | Barringer Crater is an meteor impact crater outside of Flagstaff; it's a reasonably interesting visit if you ever randomly find yourself in the middle of the Arizona desert for no particular reason |
| Central Parks | I'm actually rather surprised Central Park in New York City is this small |
| Dublin International Airports | This was the first place I found that was approximately 10 km² okay |
| Skyrims | Oblivion has a larger total area but Skyrim feels bigger because it's so much more mountainous |
| System Info | This is mostly just here because I can, but if you're experiencing trouble I guess you can write this down and send it to me or something |