Overall I guess I couldn't ask for better results, given that I've only spent 6 days building the editor and terrain codebase from the ground up.
Here is a screenshot of a sunset in-game. The new terrain is now fully integrated into the game engine. Physics / traffic / AI etc. now works with it as well.
Terrain + trees...
Here are some higher res images in-editor showing how the terrain looks with some trees....
Probably the most complex issue I've had to deal with is proper placement of roads, and limiting the terrain heights accordingly.
It was crucial to keep the un-modified terrain, and the modified terrain height as seperate values, so if you remove a piece of road in the editor, the terrain will snap back to it's normal height [grin]
Here you can see some images from the editor, the black lines show the raw terrain height points, the blue lines show the modified height points, to make the roads look more natural.
Still it's up to the map's creator to be sure things 'look good' because the editor will allow you to place roads at very steep inclines, which looks odd in some situations.
Road placement tool....
Some screens of a test city I made in a matter of minutes...
More random screens somebody might find interesting...these were taken at various stages in the last 2 days.
Does this remind you of the default XP desktop background?!?
That's it for now...I had to delay my test session today because of some random bugs probably tied to the gang spawning functions, because the test maps are so sparce I think the gang placement code is going into an infinite loop...I have to investigate. *Plays ghostbusters theme, replacing the word ghost with bug*
*Ohhh yea, also the guys at my publisher have tested the game on a Vista machine, and things are working so that's also good news [grin]
- Danny
