First look at the Terrain Tools

Looks great, nice to have a square shaped brush too, this would be very useful, very vey impressed.

Nice terrain tools so far, love the holds on terrain, I hope it can be fine-tune with the others tools.

Can't wait to see what the terrain texturing is going to look like....

We'll see a lot of people (including myself) building caves, undergrounds, Catacombs, etc.
Or maybe the hold it's just deep enough to dig a trench?

Good question 3com.
I wonder if in terrain mode, if they allowed the brush/ camera to go underground (below the terrain), if you would be able to modify only the terrain to the extent of the brush shape ONLY-- so to make caverns and not effect the ground above? For example; if there was a -- Sphere -- brush, that would be cool! And if the camera/ brush could go below ground, that would make for easy cave creation. Maybe they could look into that?

The answer to that is no, Lee has said multiple times we won't have that feature, at best we might get the ability to make holes in the terrain we can use to access entities under the terrain.

Most likely you'll have to do as they did in Skyrim - you have the beginning of a cave entrance in your terrain and then you load a new level, which is the cave you are in. Exiting the cave loads you back to the terrain level.

"Exiting the cave loads you back to the terrain level."
The problem with this is at the moment, if u return to the old level all the already killed enemies are back...

Back to the terrain tool...
Will we have the autogen tool for creating terrain same we have now with classic?

I just hope that GGmax will be powerful as we hope... I'm creating now new levels with GG classic... and the framerate is already down to 24fps... with a Nvidia 1080ti, i7 8700k... I'm just creating the levels now with classic and can later hopefully import them into MAX with a FPS boost... I hope it.

It uses a height map. It only covers Y (height) and X, Z position of said height. If you really want tunnels you will be adding height layers to the terrain which would be awesome, but probably a slow solution. Especially for when you don't want tunnels.

Nice to have but not so easy to add easily without slowdown.

Edit - Seriously, Mookia. If you are down to that fps rate with that spec you are for certain overdoing it! Sounds like you need to be a bit more precise with your maps!

@Belidos that was just a thought experiment question.
-- continuing with that; what if you mirrored two terrain planes together
top to bottom, and the top one was manipulated from below/ while the
bottom one remained normal... ?!

Like two slices of cake on top of each other-- so you dug out in the middle.
A terrain floor and a terrain ceiling flipped upside down ?

Oh, then you would add a third for above- normal playground!

Seriously,, a jungle without plants isn't a jungle

Is it going to be possible to entirely disable/delete the terrain, not just make it invisible but get rid of it in the editor without editing any config file externally?
Maybe it was already answered but I did not follow.

Thanks.

It would be great to have the GameGuru MAX editor start out completely blank ... no terrain at all. Just a blank slate. Then, if you wanted terrain, you could either import it or go to a menu or button to create your initial terrain and set parameters (size, etc.). This way, if the end-user wanted to start out creating an in-door level, they wouldn't have to "disable" the terrain.

If I understand correctly it is going to be possible to add terrain tiles to extend the terrain as big as we want it to be or something similar tech the team is working on right now. So yes I also really would like to see a blank level and let me choose if I want a terrain in the level or not. Since the functionality will be there to add more terrain tiles anyway, I see no reason why we should not be able to start a level with 0 tiles.

Of course I did requested this at day 1 for Classic and Lee did mentioned something about terrain is used for reference for something, not sure what it was but he told the terrain is must have "for now". Anyway, whatever it is, I think it should be possible to code in if there is no terrain in the level then use something else for reference, hard coded values or mouse or whatever it is the terrain is used for as reference point. Maybe have a dummy object somewhere for reference that we can't see but it is there for the engine to do it calculations.

I agree. It should be easily do-able. After all, most 3D game level editors start with a blank slate. You really don't need a reference at all, other than a grid with axis along the horizontal, crossing in the middle to indicate where world coordinate 0,0,0 is.

Which brings me to this request (which I am certain I've requested before) - Can we get a proper grid in GameGuru MAX? One that can be seen on screen (a toggle to turn on/off would be great) ... one that can be adjusted in size.

Also, can we get proper, adjustable snapping in GameGuru MAX? I mean, where I can type in a number for snapping and get exactly what I want instead of toggling between off and two presets?

I really want that voxel terrain, holes, caves and so on in GGMax, even in GG, being able to set terrain via heigh maps would be nice.
Anyway, there are some cool things you can do about terrain with GG, and I hope in GGMax too.



Nice quixel work, anyway I can't see the wet ground in GG, as I can see in Quixel.