Hi guys

I found various issues and have some suggestions and improvements.This isn't about complaints, it is irrelevant whether the product is still in development or not, alpha or beta.If you haven't read the splash screen it implies providing feedback, as such I haven't seen much feedback in regards to the grass/tree and terrain system.I implore everyone that that finds visual issues with the terrain/grass/tree system to voice their concerns.This isn't about complaining but about constructive feedback on max, so that those system get improved or at least have a look at them.



Terrain
If you have a look at the mountain biome for example you will see a lot of stretched textures which doesn't look particularly good.


These mountain tops should ideally be cover with snow. As example



There is still an issue with extremely shiny terrain textures.This is really problematic when you look up hill.Terrain should never be this shiny. Terrain textures should have no shine, and only a very slight reflection.Only time terrain textures should have a bit more shine/reflection is when wet or when next to a river bed. I have attached some screenshot which show great examples how minimal the actual shine/reflection should be on terrains. (this applies to some textures not all of them are this shiny)


Dry land areas.




Example of river bed and still no where near as shinny as gameguru



Some suggestions to fix issues with regards to stretched textures and increase quality
Since terrain textures are seamless, tiling of textures is an option. Having the ability to select the amount of tiling when setting a new level would be great.

Once a terrain and biome has been selected it would be ideal to have the ability to select a terrain texture select the amount of tiling and paint the terrain texture selected with that amount of tiling. It will drastically increase the quality of the ground textures.

In classic one could paint grass by a means of a mask. This can also be applied to terrain textures especially if you like to paint a snow top on a mountain for example.This could be done with example selecting a mask brush paint and edit the areas you would like to mask, after which you select paint mask brush select texture and only paint the areas where you have painted the mask.

The over all texture blending is pretty harsh there is only a small texture blend between two texture, if you have a look at photoshop/gimp ect they all have the ability to set the opacity of the brush.




There is a bit of an issue with terrain symmetry issue with the forest and rain forest biome. The biome should ideally have different areas like hilly area, a flatter plain area, lake area and mountainous area. Rain forest biome should ideally be somewhat flat-ish, while it does contain mountainous areas and hilly areas the elevation in rain forests is mostly consistent. Rain forest biome is extremely densely populated with foliage, very little light actually reach the ground. I am not sure gameguru is able to pull that off, I would much rather not have the rain forest biome in gameguru max if it can't do it proper justice, it just isn't populated enough and look to similar to the forest biome. There will definitely be some flack on steam in reviews for that.



Grass
Blending of grass types and flowers is pretty great, however the overall coverage is pretty poor and pretty patchy and this is made even worse when painting several flower types with the grass mixed in. Setting the height and width on grass has been completely omitted.
Rendering area for grass is also pretty small compared to classic from what I can see, and this is made even worse with the patchy grass painting in general.

Customizing the grass is sorely lacking the features that it needs to improve overall look.

I can understand that hardware support needs to be taken into account however in two years that hardware will no longer be supported by nvidia. GTX 900 series support stops in 2024. I have and so has many others become accustom to the ability to tweak various aspects of the software, like rendering distance of the terrain and a few other things. However this is problematic for users with higher end hardware, especially in rendering distances of grass and the billboarding of trees, being able to set the distance as which trees start with billboard trees would future proof visuals in 4 years or 10 years from now.

Hard locking of rendering distances of grass and trees is not ideal. I do understand this was done with performance in mind, but it seems quite a bit of gameguru max has been hard lock with performance in mind. However this becomes a real problem especially if one has a look at the billboard trees in the background the quality of the trees isn't particular good.

I can understand that if the hard locks was put in place intentionally to give everyone the same performance and to avoid any backlash on steam and complaints of poor performance. But this could have been easily countered with hiding the sliders in the advance menu as you currently doing and giving a proper warning window enabling the these sliders will drastically reduce performance.

Some how max feels tremendously restrictive and general controls and features have been dumb down to some extend.

There is additionally some questions.
Will the grass/tree generator system be opened up that users can import/add their own trees and grass to use with the system, Currently the system is not editable or customizable ?

Will the restrictive nature of many features of max stay in place. For example not being able to set the rendering distance of trees, grass and terrain. ?

Will features ever be customizable like it was previously was in classic and to what extend ?

Will water height issue be fixed. You can only set it in meters, which is a real problem, if you have a indoor level and want to add water. ?

I must say i do agree with you about textures and the grass is very old school
The shine is unnecessary and covers all
The grass is like holding an 8 yr olds picture against a turner painting

Needs to be less chunkynand thinner with more clumping as seen in then shots. The grass needs to be different heights and to be thinner blades with more blades per poly.
This would really up the grass
The terrain textures is where it is being let down as you need grass to cover the obvious not good enough texture painting. Its not got blending yet either. There is a lot of work needs doing. This can be sorted if they can be bothered to.
The difference is the better the world looks as in getting the terrain pbr textures bang on and the grass needs a rewrite of new and improved grass like as above.
They need to random the grass sizes as well as the trees.
Rocks not sure on that but im sure there could be a scatter rocks button. But i can add rocks no problem

Trees need to o have variety even of the same tree as in size trunk change and the varieties could match each other at present tree mixing looks like a quality street tin.

Sort them out properly no rush and life will be great in the meadows and forests

To also sort the sky night day out and weather as forecast by tgc.

The underwater needs even just a distort or a change of colour from the surface this will be a big help

Weather needs a lot of work regarding rain. Snow they have a sort of good version of it.

They have ambience sounds and footfall efx and have quite a bit of logic now the ai has improved too

But the world i agree needs love and attention to detail

You should post this on GitHub and maybe provide a link to this thread.

About texture res tiling might be the cheapest way to go; anyway, for larger surfaces such as terrain I would prefer to use UDIMS tech, so, you divide the surface into sections, generate an island for each one in your unwrapped 3d soft (supporting udims of course) such as 3ds max (thru a plugin), thus you get high-quality textures; problem is that UDIMs uses several files, and should to be supported by GGMax.
I guess TGC must be using low-res textures for sake of performance, however, they should end up increasing the texture res or tiling as suggested.

About trees and grass, it is not a completed feature yet, so, this is a good moment for suggestions like yours.
Trees and grass systems obviously will need more settings to play with, and the height and width come in handy to get variation, more randomness might help as well. Maybe using seeds to get different kinds of trees and grass, not just the pine one at the same height and position.

About terrain generation, maybe TGC will consider supporting heightmaps, real-world data must be nice as well, custom terrain support would be nice as well.

https://www.world-creator.com/

There are a lot of factors to take into account when generating terrain, limits might be the level of complexity you want to achieve, and don't forget here the hardware capabilities each one has. For both reasons, I think those should be fully configurable by the user, and they might be resource-based. The user is able to choose the level of complexity based on the resources he has. There may be low res support but high res support as well, as for example, how many trees you want to place in your map at a time, and/or rendering distance, and so on.

About water, yes, the water heigh should be improved, even provide the water transparency, foam; going more on depth, water collision (i.e. water collisions with riverside stones) must be the icy of the cake, though.

IMHO - Has nothing to do with this thread, just my thoughts
For me terrain is not that bad, it is just an uncompleted feature; anyway, with a bit of workaround I can get beautiful landscapes; however, I know what we want and what we need to be implemented in GGMax, is just that I don't allow then this lack of resources stop me for doing my things.

Hello Wizard of id.
I daily read your comments in the "Broadcast" threads.
I noticed that it is possible to save the terrain settings in a .ter file (ascii format) stored in your projects folder "..\Files\databank\terrainsettings".
Therefore it is quite possible to edit those settings.

Your note about the "extremely shiny textures" confirms my opinion about them even if sometimes real terrains covered with grass are populated by millions of cobwebs ( https://bugguide.net/node/view/344840/bgimage ).

Here is a screenshot of a terrain generated after having modified settings in a .ter file :


Please note that I limited the performances of my graphic card to 30 FPS to reduce my energy consumption.
I am testing every settings of GameGuru MAX with the guess method preferably setting by setting.
I may suppose that reducing the shininess of the terrain's textures could provide better performances of the terrain rendering, but I am not a specialist in that matter. I simply see the statistics shown in the "performance data" panel.

With one of my modeler I am able to create procedural terrains (quad meshes) to which I can apply GlTF (PBR) textures.
I imagined that it could be possible to combine a few layers of those textures (playing with their transparency value) to obtain more realistic transitions in the overlapping of textures.
Another idea about the slopes where textures are submitted to high distorsions. I think that it could be possible to "drape" them with low poly meshes having more realistic textures.

There has been no word on the rock system, no a single mention or teaser in this regard for several weeks now. So remains to be seen if some thing will be done in this regard.

Thing is, both the grass, trees and if there ever is a rock system, doesn't take elevation into account that much, currently, there is only tree exclusions based on angle of the terrain and pending the texture that is painted like rocks for example. The system doesn't necessarily take into account terrain elevation if at all, it seems the trees and grass generation is only by set conditions, being met I have for example in some cases spotted trees that are in the water for example, or trees in areas you generally won't expect.

I think many areas of the code is too far along and the door has essentially shut on many aspects, so I don't expect major changes others then a few tweaks here and there, which is a real shame. It is a good bet if these things are ever looked at we might get some improvements but not all of them. But if I have to choose it would be, setting the opacity of the brush and being able to set the tiling of textures with a brush before paints.The other issues can sort of be worked around with maybe the exception of grass which really needs to be a lot thicker and have height and width adjustments.

I sent lee an email in this regard.

All very good points !!
Lee did say this was the first draft so hopefully this will give him some good feedback for improvements.

That is the rather annoying part of it all, while you could manually edit it as you see fit.Why wasn't this made available for editing in the software. As mentioned before the rather dumb down version of the UI, really doesn't give you much room to customize to exactly what you need. I am really scratching my head trying to figure out why they decided to go with this UI approach, it is quite limited in functionality.

If you have a look at the change log it mentions this is the final UI we are getting. Which really is concerning.Which means there is next to nothing you can do or work around to improve the patchy grass or billboard trees.

Yes I would love to see hills coveredib trees and. Unable to see the terrain for bushy leaves like you see on most games we have a speckled map dont get me wrong this poops. On classic for terrain and efx and even ai and movement of entities is fab and the paint assigned terrain
Just crude painting and no random grass trees etc. To bush up a hill you have to Place manually to get a desired woodland. I know a long Way to go. I'm happy with progress butif woi is concerned then i am a bit as he has a direct link to the red phone. So hopefully there will be lots of fine tuning the terrain extras etc

Not at all.While working on assets for max.The instruction was not to bug Lee at all.Rick is keeping a tight leash on Lee, so he doesn't wander off.

As off late they are very busy with trying to finish year end work and stuff. For me personally I have completely shut down for the year with regards to making models, so the last two weeks or so really has been the first time I have been able to give max a proper run down.I am not happy in the least.....enough so, that iam not sure I will be using max outdoor environments at all or max at all.

Most might not even be aware if you place a large mesh over sculpted terrain, several things happens.

Ai would randomly just fall through the floor or not appear at all, the system they designed intended for the terrain to be flat underneath any mesh you place.This still hasn't changed to date and not sure it will likely change in future.Which really restricts designing assets that rely on digging out the terrain and placing assets with more then one level or area, and have no idea if there is any intention of having it fixed or addressed.

zones areas you place follow the contours of the terrain underneath a mesh or assets, not the mesh so even if you place triggers they simply won't work, almost every thing relies on the terrain for the logic system to work correctly.



Having used several versions of classic as well as fpsc and x10, I have a good idea of how the functionality and direction they generally take and provide.What has me concerned is the direction they are taking with max with regards to several things.You actually have way less control, this may actually be intentional and doubtful any thing to due with alpha state.

Well i hear your concerns
However they have been watching us on here and i know they have eyes on here. So maybe they will take heed.
I am sure they won't release a one size tree terrain that will be just bad for marketing. So i think variety is on the way im hoping they review the plamt life as when you compare other grass on engines to max. It is a bit iffy. Need better hd grasses more clumpex amd less poly obvious

But lets just see

Not likely they will take any noticeable actions.Pretty sure what we are seeing and getting now will be as close to the final release in march.You can bet they won't be missing the 25th of march deadline. It is what it is and we will just have to wait and see how steam takes it, too early to give any sort of prediction. Closest prediction I have is that there is going to be a lot of complaints especially with populating levels, as right now the biggest drain on performance is going to be shadow rendering.FPS really seems to tank in that regard.If you turn off or lower the resolution of the dynamic lighting system.There is a massive boost in fps in general, so I suspect that is some thing that needs to be looked at sooner or later.

Some thing that might help the cause a little is a blur shader, full screen shader or two to soften up the scene a little might actually help hide a couple of issues too.Iam really hoping to get access to the grass and terrain systems, soon it would assist in improving textures your self.Bit puzzled why we don't have access to that yet.

It is a really problem as essentially the main gameguru max folder and files is essentially '' write protected'' if you manage to edit any files it wouldnt work or it simply will get overwritten or deleted with every update.

But it is some thing I will be asking in the broadcast tomorrow, when and if we can start adding our own textures and trees/ grass models.It will give us some idea if these systems will be hard locked or not, as well as when we can expect to be able to edit that.

Well they said from now to release tbey are working on whats there

Which is a sign they are concentrating on whats there not new stuff

Well if you can make the broadcast, or any one else, is to ask questions related to issues they find or questions relating to editing of various things it should give lots of clarity going forward.

If you have questions with regards to the tree/grass and terrain, ask away I will post and ask as many as lee will allow in the live broadcast
I am sure sync will be willing to post some questions as well

Im happy for them to concentrate on whats there and get it right, I just would like to know what is going to be followed up next and how soon after all this is supposed to be the flag ship product and is supposed to be better than GGClassic.

Is it really a GG max problem itself?We had better terrain made in classic having a weaker render engine

Concidering the graphical possibilities of max we should get atleast something like the last photo from you of the river bed

Yes shouldn't be a problem doing it, trees are of higher quality thought.

But I have asked most questions with regards to when we will be able to import our own grasses and trees. Not exactly a clear cut as to when this will happen and completely forgot to ask about the rock generation system, sigh

But I will be hitting github tomorrow.
Points I will raise
All of the terrain textures of poor quality
Textures that have too much shine
The poor billboard trees
The poor grass coverage
Missing height and width sliders for grass
The grass rendering distance
Will try and make best possible case for getting a tree/billboard tree and grass rendering distance slider.
The poor texture blending of terrain textures.
Water height issue being only in meters.
Symmetry of some of the biome terrain generation.


Will try and fight a good one to, so we can get the terrain/grass/trees up to scratch, so might take a couple of hours to do some research, get examples and posting to github, hopefully it will help.

Q @ WOI;
Great list to bring up. "forgot to ask about the rock generation system"
Yes sir. Please prod GGMAX on Github about >rocks< . That would be a nice feature to paint rocks, and I am thinking that 'Zones' is a good way to do it for the manner you can create any shape you want. Then just to paint inside that zone would provide a mask effect. Interestingly you said; "In classic one could paint grass by a means of a mask."

That's a big mystery to me. What do you mean, and what am I missing here? What kind of mask brush does classic have if really such a thing exists all this time I didn't know? Anyhow, let's tumble some rocks?

Max is realtime so it has no need for masks and such for the engine to remember where it needs to render grass, when you go press play. What you see is what you get, with max.

Having a mask brush with various brush shapes, even the ability you own brushes would allow for some really natural looking terrain features with the textures you paint.

How it would essentially work is you
Select mask brush and paint the area you want to texture, fine tune it ect.
Select the paint mask icon, which will allow you to select a texture and it will only paint the area of the mask.
Have a add and subtract mask icons, this will allow essentially to fine tune the mask exactly as you need.

You can essentially use the same mask brush a idea for trees and grass as well, it will allow creating better foot paths and lot more natural tree foliage in general.

Additionally you can take it a step further and automatically apply density to the mix the less opacity the mask has the less get painted.

This isn't new technology, classic used it only used it for the grass system, and because every thing is done in realtime in max doesn't actually mean it isn't using a mask of sorts, The engine can pick up various areas based on the layer name of the terrain texture used and automatically use that information to exclude those areas from rendering grass. So it is still using a mask of sorts, as the engine still needs to know where to render grass and trees.



Rocks is quite different as you require several models of different shapes and sizes and this needs to lay flat on various terrain areas.However this isn't a problem as lee already showcased this in the latest broadcast of the object placement system.

So yeah my general concern is how rigid the systems in place are, there really isn't any flexibility in the overall use currently, if they were to release it like it is now on steam even if you tweak, the biomes and update the textures and models, it wouldn't go down to well.

Make no mistake the ideas lee implemented is great, it just lacks that little extra push that makes it look exceptional.Billboard trees is a great idea, but the quality just isn't there yet, and lacks the flexibility for users with stronger hardware and future proofing the software.

There is no doubt in my mind that you could render every inch of screen with thick grass/rocks/trees in 3 or 4 years time. The option should be there and ignore the fact today's low end hardware would have performance issues. In fact you can improve performance even more if you have those options.

So my biggest battle with TGC is going to be to add more settings to tweak performance and visuals, and it won't be easy.So will need to be descriptive as possible as well as explain the reasoning behind it.

Good luck with the battle

Oh-- that's not really the way I think of as masking in a paint program when I think of the masking technique. It's not really technically important, but it confused me. A paint mask first outlines an area of any shape and then you can wave your brush all over the entire canvas, but the paint only fills inside the mask. Maybe that's actually kinda where you are leading to....?

Again, I would promote zones If I was going to present an idea for "masking" to Lee. You could have entity zones actually but for this cause you could have a "Mask Zone" so that whatever you paint down next with an active "Mask Zone" whether it's trees, grass, rocks, ice, snow, it fills the mask zone only, or you could 'negative' the mask ( or- even BETTER! ) select all your entities and click
[x] No_Cover_Entity
while painting to prohibit for example grass from growing on your sidewalks, roads, etc!

I've already created just the other day a rudimentary shore procedural placement of rocks and ripple objects in the water at the shore. I did that in a matter of minutes- it's easy. It's also very easy to find if the player is in a zone, but extremely frustrating that entities cannot be detected in zones in GG API. *Mind Blown!* When TGC decide to implement these features they will help turn the 2d look of GGMAX terrain into a nice 3d map builder. Which brings up-- Next will be an awesome 3d STRUCTURE builder.

One last little niggle is that rocks don't have to conform flat to the terrain angle-- yes certain one's do, but in fact all over round- ish rock entities would be more random if turned on all 3 axis. For your own script, you can sprinkle them down from the air-- but all that's for another far future day when the evolution here is much more ripened.

I found this interesting page : https://worldofleveldesign.com/categories/ue4/landscape-macro-tiling-variation.php

The "Mask Scale" combined with the "Texture Tiling Fallof" gives interesting results when the terrain is painted in the "Debug Mode" :


Personally I especially like those ideas in this thread :
(by Science boy).

(by 3com).

(by GubbyBlips).

The point of masking is to be able to create some thing like this.


Try doing this with max now and it would fail spectacularly, as there would not be enough opacity blending between the textures and with the crude shapes of the brushes doesn't allow finer detail.

But it is okay, each one person has their own idea of masking entails.The point with masks I was making was to improve texture painting in general.The thing is terrain texture are not blending well and the landscape is generally one texture or the other it isn't very natural looking.
In order to blend areas better you would need an opacity based mask, it will allow blending the edges of different textures better as well as being able to paint blending of two textures with a larger transition.

The masks allows for painting specific details, like snow, a foot path, gold/iron veins, or wet patches on the terrain ect the list goes on, masking is done to allow adding specific details, with various degrees of opacity. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a terrain texture, recent forest fine, add a specific scorch texture for that. It would mean you could paint literally any thing on the terrain. It isn't about creating exclusions zones or trees or grass ect.

It is about the control you have over what you specifically paint on the terrain. I could for example paint a cobble road for example and use the mask to paint snow of the road or pebbles or grass blades or whatever you would expect to be scattered on a cobble road, horse droppings if you want to go that far. If you add transparency and the opacity of the brush to the mix you get far more detail in.

It is really about expanding the terrain painting tools to add more detail and the better blending of textures.

Texture painting is super basic at the moment. Relying on the new veg system to hide it in the main. Now I agree both texture painting and grass need improving, but I can also understand TGC making it basic for now and concentrating their efforts elsewhere.

Grass could be massively improved by having a fade off on the edges and a random min/max height. Density should be a simple matter in code, but obviously they are keeping it low for speed reasons at present. It works from the perspective Max games play at mostly, but it was also the first thing I noticed

These are the niggles that should hopefully be fixed in the last few months polish work

I'm really happy to have read this entire Post. All your remarks about the current defects, and all your suggestions to try to remove them are relevant. I hope with all my heart that you will be heard, as much for the herbs as for rocks and textures. Because without that, I fear that Max will ultimately be a waste of time and energy.

Thank you.

Will have to wait and see.

Ultravox, you do have a voice and if you sing a hymn you may find yourself with tears in your eyes but they cant do it all in one day you will see some great advances this coming year.

Reminds me need to verify my flight to vienna.


Japes aside. I think they will get it sorted

I wish they would concentrate more on improving he terrain textures and texture painting/blending rather than creating these randomly generated biomes complete with trees and rocks blah blah.

I want a game engine where i can push my creativity, not a one button game level creator.

Belidos

I totally agree with you
The problem will be too many of the same landscape one button gamers

The terrains need to be totally editable with textires painting etc etc.