A tool that Let's you dig the terrain until you hit water at least. ..

i think we could be able to do this in 3d mode if we can change the angel of the terrain editing tool to be horizontal some how, this would make for great cave tool perhaps.?

This seems both useful and intuitive to me as part of the terrain editor.



However, it would only be both useful and intuitive if the terrain editor had a fluid method of moving/changing the view. Not a simple overhead / 3rd party view *switching* mechanism, I mean full fluid and dynamic view angle changing. Similar to the way you can change your view in many games by holding the right mouse button down and moving the mouse to rotate the view in all axis.

The problem here would be with poly's, as it is they are spread over the entire terrain and to create a cave from the available poly's in your surrounding area would lead to severe stretching of texture. In other words the terrain isn't capable for it as it is right now, even if a way was found to 'tunnel' horizontally. At best you might achieve a long straight tunnel which looks pretty bad. You wont be creating a tunnel which goes through a mountain and appears at the other end (you just pushed a bunch of faces down there and they won't go away).



It's best to have some kind of terrain cutting tool to remove areas of terrain for access to modeled cave areas, this is how it's done by top games out there even today as it just looks so much better..



You will notice that many even use a simple cutscene to transition between these kind of areas using a completely new level.



It can work quite well if levels are smaller than using the entire build area at once, break it up and it will run a lot better

For caves its best to do what Fallout and Skyrim does and this is a static entity of caves, funny enough pieced together in a similar fashion as our new construction kit.



Caves are very rarely ever dug out of a terrain plane. You pretty much have your terrain as your base always and anything that happens to overhang above the player is always a static structure (not of the same model the terrain). In most cases there is no terrain plane at all.







Fallout/Skyrim does this as well. I personally do not plane to have a cave level outdoors anyhow. Its best to build areas like that as an interior map. When we get our hands on the construction kit I will immediately be planning to create more organic looking walls, floors and ceiling models - for the use of internal cave building.



Here's an example of a Skyrim cave which is completely interior and does not use a terrain plane base. Just stitched together cave pieces which we will be able to do soon with the construction kit.

hmmm great idea I am tending to agree after watching that video

its a art work but it adds atmosphere.



I initially thought that you might be able to "Dig" and have the editor add joins and vertices that would be of equal distance based on the area that had been dug out and this would get around the issue of stretching textures and having holes all the way thru the map



but either idea works fine