Scene Commander,
Heres a few more things that might like to be considered just from the same scene which come to mind.
See screen shot attached :
As you can see there's quite a lot of fine detail in the terrain just in camera v which bring out some issues if you want to call them that. All water is less than the Player height - in fact its around player waist height at most. The player is standing in water which just covers the surface of the sand by a few inches in many places.....
Considerations :
Not easy to adjust the height of terrain finely enough to achieve this as lowering and highering the terrain or water using the relevant tool tends to be in heights of more than an inch or two in one jump up or down and small adjustments are very difficult. We don't have a strength adjustment for the tools. Not a biggy as we can do it with a lot of care but its hard work.
More importantly users apparently have no sensible way to stop the player dying when they enter water and go under it unless the health settings regeneration would help but then that would I guess also apply to when the player is on dry land which is a different scenario during gameplay. No specific health adjustments just for water existing. Thus I cant have water that the player can go into above his head height or the player does almost instantly which is infuriating and would hardly ever be needed percentage wise in most game scenarios - unless we fall into lava or some other such liquid?
More important still AI : if you look at the enemy here he is standing on a very small island of sand a few feet long at most. The sand hump he stands upon is no more than about 1 foot high all around in close proximity in view the water as said is just two inches deep and can hardly be seen as being almost invisible with such low depth. The enemy has a view range of 3000 units so on dry land would be able to follow the player anywhere around the level even if you run away and follow you. However as there is a very low coverage of water here over the sandy areas in a complex pattern the enemy is stuck where he is on his minute island and cannot go anywhere being stuck out in the open in a fixed position as he cannot enter water at all even if its only half of one inch high. Clearly the enemy visually one would think could follow and move to the player here but cant can he. In fact he cannot even move around anywhere at all as there is no land bridge for him to follow the player or approach the player by navigation around the very low water areas, cant walk over them or around them for which he must have a land link of some height above water of any height.
The player here is standing in water of just an inch or so height as you can see if you look closely and you would expect the enemy to be able to walk straight towards the player but he can go nowhere at all.
We can see the need to prevent enemies entering water as like the player they cant swim though in scenarios like this. e.g. marsh, swamp, mangrove, beach, mudflats, estuary and alike then somewhat difficult to use enemies unless they can traverse low bodies of water.
Yes of course we know we can design a land linkage system for them to get around with enough work and I am making a point in specific case scenarios however the general point is valid. Can we not have a water height check for enemies so that they could enter water below say waist or knee height given it would not be a massive additional drain of AI thinking. I guess not due to how the water system/plane works considering they may not ever be able to swim.
System : Advent Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. Intel(R). i5-2310 CPU @ 2.90GHz. 8.00 GB RAM DDR3. Storage : 1389 GB : 1088 GB Free (1389 GB Total). Graphics : NVIDIA GeForce GT 530. Total Available Graphics Memory : 4095 MB. Dedicated : 1024 MB. Shared : 3071 MB. Direct X10
