General question on how folks handle the edges of terrain, do you put natural items in the way? (Mountains, Rocks, Fences) or do you put up an invisible wall? Are players able to walk into the ocean or does the engine block them (Have not tried it yet).

Also it would be nice to have a map with the edges already turn down into the ocean, as this size map, with the speed of lower terrain (even with shift) its going to take awhile.

Also are we able to create smaller sized maps?

I appreciate everyone's help and I love the random terrain generator.

I would put natural things in the way so they don't see the terrain edges, I would also try to make it that whatever the player is standing on (whether object or terrain), they still can't see the terrain edges.

Thats a helpful tidbit thanks MadLab. Ahh if you do drop into water your drown.

Water, buildings, trees, mountains, fences....

Don't do what I did. Downloaded a huge radio tower that reveals the entire map terrain at height. Only way I can use it is to fog everything out which kind of defeats the purpose

But yes. Sloping terrain, trees, building facades ( the new mega pack DLC' s have some great models for this). Cliffs, mountains and of course, limiting the players range if on open terrain using zones.

Environmental effects that hurt, such as heat, radiation sources etc. are great for "containing" a player too.

Thanks all I didn't consider the environmental effects great idea.

With some of the new decals etc. and some hurt scripting (there's plenty of snippets around) you can setup firewalls (the burning kind) for example.

One I'm using is "heat exposure" in my Aussie map (as one source) and it forces a player to remain around shady trees and water sources - or face the consequences. If done right, a player might think he's making a "choice" when in fact he's being "directed"

(and a nice long "Dogfence" - an actual Australian Dingo control measure - is in place just in case)

Something I picked up on here


I have a template predone for this. Dig down to water or a base depth - leave a little piece of land up as map center to build from. Set brush to 2, maximise the brush, center the cursor on the water and paint the whole map. Save the map and if you need a water map, load that one and use save as to edit away.

Also, if you look at skyboxes, you can edit the top half of skybox .tga files to be scenery. This way the terrain edges can be masked with a background giving a seamless view. You still need blocking but it makes the map look..... full.

Mega pack 1 DLC has a good example of this in desert 3 skybox.

There is an invisible wall in the forums here somewhere, in free models I think.
Its easy to use and works great from the test I done with it a while back.