Terrain Editor Preview Release Notes
From Multiverse
IMPORTANT: This is a preview release. We strongly advise you to back up your data, because at this early stage its possible that the tool may corrupt data, or be unstable, and cause you to lose work, so save and backup your files often.
It's also not suitable for use in production. The final Toolbox release will have greatly improved stability and reliability.
For general documentation, see Using Terrain Editor Preview.
Contents |
Hardware and software requirements
Hardware
Minimum requirements:
- Processor: Pentium 4 with 1GHz or greater
- RAM: 512 MB+
- Video: DirectX 9 compatible Video Card. Pixel shader 2.0 and vertex shader compatible hardware with 128 MB of texture memory
- Audio: DirectSound compatible sound card
Operating system
The Multiverse tools currently run on:
- Windows Vista
- Windows XP Home and Professional
- Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
- Windows XP international (non-US-English)
Support for other operating systems is planned.
Installation notes
Installation requires having .NET 3.5. The installer will download and install it for you if you do not already have it; note this can be a lengthy download. Windows Vista users should already have .NET 3.5 installed, so this should only affect Windows XP users.
Reporting issues
Please post bugs or comments to the Bugs and Issues Forum on the Multiverse Developer Forums.
We have not yet performed extensive testing and crashes may occur during use.
- IMPORTANT: Save your work often because crashes will most likely result in lost work.
- When crashes do occur, locate the log file in the the "Multiverse Terrain Editor" directory within the "My Documents" directory, and post to the forum indicated above. Any other information you have that may help track down the issue would be appreciated.
New features and changes
This preview release of Terrain Editor provides the following key features:
- Ability to "terraform" (raise/lower/pull/level/smooth/erode) terrain level with complete detailed control.
- Automatic conversion of fractal-based terrain to heightmap-based terrain. The Multiverse terrain system is moving away from "fractal terrain" to "heightmap terrain." An upcoming platform release will deprecate fractal terrain; however, the client & server will continue to support old fractal terrain files for some time.
- Ability to "paint" terrain textures on the ground.
- Automatic conversion of auto-splat-based terrain texturing to alpha mapped terrain textures. The Multiverse terrain system is moving away from "auto-splatted terrain textures" to "alpha-mapped terrain textures." An upcoming platform release will deprecate auto-splatted terrain; however, the client will continue to support old auto-splatted terrain files for some time.
Preview update release
The preview update release includes numerous bug fixes, UI changes and several new features:
- Start Menu | New World command enables you to create a new world with thirty predefined terrain files to start with.
- New brushes in Terraform toolbar: erode, pull, and smooth.
Bugs fixed
Preview update release
- Need lots of sample worlds
- Need to be able to create a new terrain (uses sample worlds)
- Fully opaque brush shouldn't hide terrain features
- Skybox and fog persist when opening new world
- Missing DDS file required by Terrain Editor
- Exception on startup / Missing assets?
- Missing resource entries for commands related to Elevations view
- The auto-splat brush tool Applying texture incorrectly
- Rename ErodeTerrainBlender
- Save is disabled after one save and does not become active to allow more saves
- File path to world never shows up in UI
- Properties do not get updated in the grid after undo/redo
- Elevations view title isn't user friendly
- Project tree commands should save/restore tree state
- Changing properties in the properties view causes the project tree to get rebuilt
- Erode terrain is way too slow
- Need to review the toolbar layout
- Brush controls should fit in terrain tab
- Need copy and paste out of output
- Terraform operations are selectable durring paint only brush mode
- Close model command display text isn't quite right
- Close World command is missing input binding
Known issues
| Bug | Area | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1132 | Brush | Brush cursor (the big yellow thingy) sometimes disappears. |
| 1006 | General | Exiting Terrain Editor throws an exception |
| 1057 | General | Screen locking can cause terrain to require update |
| 1131 | General | Reloading open worlds doesn't work properly |
| 1004 | Project | Unknown nodes are added to the LogicalModel and displayed in the Project Tree |
| 1026 | Terraform | Flat world can cause depression around fuzzy brush |
| 1135 | Terraform | Undo / Redo has leftover 1-pixel edge sometimes |
| 1137 | Terraform | Fast 225+ brushspeeds doing terraform (Crash Happens) |
| 1054 | Texture | Need to create a backing store for painting textures to prevent continous aggregate updates during a brush stroke |
| 1095 | Texture | Alpha on soft brushes isn't working all the time |
| 1115 | Texture | Terraforming fails if alpha texture is missing (not available according to MMF) |
| 1121 | Texture | Terraform/Texture performance is too slow |
| 1068 | Usability | Exception tooltip goes away far too quickly |
| 1109 | Usability | Near and Far fields in the scene tool strip are confusing |
| 1134 | Usability | Disable brush modes when not appropriate |
| 1146 | Usability | Make nomenclature for Auto-Splatting and Auto-Splat-Rules consistent |
| 1189 | Usability | Feature request: Add a button to apply Auto-splatting rules to the entire world |
| 1194 | Usability | Default docking location of Help/Output/Errors view is not correct. |
