Hi,

This is not strictly Off Topic, but might be considered Off Piste as far as the creation of game maps goes.
I'm not new to FPSC or FPSCR as I have had a copy since the beginning of time. However I haven't really played with it much. I got involved in the Reloaded mainly because my son likes to dabble with it.
However having tried the map editor out, I can see some interesting other uses for this software.
I would like to know if there is/will be a way of importing real terrain data into the map editor?
Not too sure what format this data would take. I'm sure there must be some standards out there used by the OS and others. Or it could just be a spreadsheet, CSV or other file containing relative X,Y,Z (lat, Long, Alt) data.
If not is it possible to get details of the map terrain file content in order to create a third party converter.
The idea being to create an initial terrain based on real land formations rather than starting flat (or random) and building it manually.
Sorry if this topic is old hat or is posted in the wrong section. But I couldn't find anything through the forum search.

Regards
Graeme

Moved to product chat

Amazingly we've only had one request in the non-feature creep part of the forum for this one. It would probably be a terrain import feature which takes in height map image and goes from there. As always if there is enough community momentum for the idea, it will find it's way into the engine

I'd like to see this too please - it would be a great addition and allow more 'real world' based simulations/walkthroughs possible

Slainte!

SW

If the terrain import feature maps to the terrain engine and behaves like terrain does now then I definitely would like to see this. I'm not seeing a reason to do this if characters can't walk on imported terrain or objects just fall through it. But there are some good 3rd party terrain generation tools like l3dt, earth sculptor, etc that would be great for building terrains in. Considering the current editor doesn't have a lot of the sculpting or smoothing feature that these other tools have, it would be useful to be able to build terrains in these other tools and use them in Reloaded. It would also have to honor the custom texture mapping.

I've used I3dt and it's pretty cool, in fact, I used a small terrain I had created in it in my comp level and just imported it as an entity, simply placed on top of the existing terrain, so that when you assembled the time machine, you were transported from the desert to a lush tropical paradise. But that's another story. Would it not be practical to do that (of course getting rid of the original terrain first, unlike I did) or would one using heightmap data be more resource friendly?

I can see a lot of useful advantages on being able to import terrain. It would make it much easier to model roads that fit the first time, have exact flat pad spot for special buildings, and tunnels, all fitting the terrain as it was modeled in the model program.

I would like to see this ability also. But as tomjscott mentioned, it would be almost useless if npc cant walk on it. The editor would have to be able to import it just like the terrain is now, and it would need to function collision wise the same.

So yes I would like this also in time.

I talked about this in my initial post here:

http://fpscrforum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=45&b=1