Biome work might not be *as* important anymore.

Okay, so Uber has told us that a true map editor is in the work, heck they were nice enough to tell @cola_colin not to work too hard on his map editor as... We're going to have one for real in the forseable future.

If you think about it... This may mean Uber might not need to work on biome generation as much as they needed to in the past. We'll be making our own maps, with choke points and all.

My only request to Uber on the map editor... Make sure there's an option to place brushes in symmetry, so they show up on both sides of the planet, please.

Need more information!

From how I see it a custom biome and a custom map are pretty much the same thing

How I see it the Biome are the visuals and the map is the map.. How it plays etc.. Visual wise Biomes are severly lacking and we all know it. Take a look back at the concept/alpha footage.. Thats some really hot stuff that wassn't feasible at that time but with all the Pathfinding improvements and optimizations I think it is really feasible and would bring the game to the next level. As everything is pretty damn flat right now.

The point @squishypon3 is making is that with a direct map editor capability, we can manually place pieces of CSG in any way we like. It's also not much of a stretch to use *CSG brushes* made by the community in blender. At which point we can literally make anything we want, including complex terrain features

That's true but still.. I find it too easy to just shove it all to the modders. Modders should not be used to build such things. especially not when Uber is still working hard on the game. If it means that modders will make a lot of visual content which is going to be in every map and every game they should pay them for it. Modders make amazing stuff. But they should not take away the work Uber has infront of them.

I have trouble wording it for some reason but I hope you understand my point

Yes it needs symmetry, but more than one: N-E, S-W, and radial for 180, 90, 120, 60 deg. (2, 4, 3 and 6 times around planet).

one step at a time ...

But every game without random generation has the same excuse essentially.

The burning question I have is: will these new tools support various terrain elevations and 3D textures? I.e. can we really start to play around with proper terrain features that add strategic elements? Even if not (just cracks, mountains, etc) i'm still happy but the full do would be amazing.

I''m also wondering how the pathfinding will act when these csg brushes are in place. Pretty cool though!

You can right now. It's just a pain to make it look good, as you have no preview at all until you reload the whole thing.

Neither will ours, with custom maps we can make... custom maps with custom csg and choke points, it'll be just like any other games editor.

It's not even modders with this, it's people using a map editor.

The metal planets with their trenches prove that this sort of thing is possible in the engine, any chance of having a couple of randomly-generated items like this pop up in desert biomes?

wow this is cool news, I didn't actually think it was going to happen. (Id assumed not enough people were interested for uber to consider it).

I'm really looking farward to playing with this.

The Biomes features need to be created first. Like Cliffs and stuff. not the Cliffs from the Cliffs mod, They are absolutly teeribad (sorry if I offend some one with it but they are) I mean real cliffs, Real lava cliffs Bridges etc etc... A visual update on graphics which also create new types of gameplay mechanics. Those should not be made by modders, those features need to be created primairly by Uber. Modders can than build upon that and create new features etc. but the basis has to be done by Uber.

Problem is yes you have you fully customizalble editor. But you are limited by the lack of assets which you can use. which limits Mapcreaters like Superouman (famous for his amazing SC2 maps) from creating amazing maps both gameplay wise and visually.

Because with what are you going to try and create a great diverse set of maps? 2 diffrent Cracks, Super annoying impassable low rocks that bland with the ground too much, lava, water, a couple of diffrent mountains and a forest.

Whoopty Kitten Doo!

We actually have a lot of brushes not used in the game.

Not to mention we can make custom brushes if we want, cliffs are easy, subtractive brushes placed on large hills.

There are mainly nice brushes not used yet, or stopped being used.

I'm still disappointed by the lack of biome-specific buildings or features. Trees are a nice token gesture, but there's not a lot to differentiate planets besides water percentage. At a stretch, Lava planets are technically interesting because of the absolute un-build-ability of lava, but it's not much. Where are the biome-specific buildings, like volcano-topping power generators?

Interesting.. I did not know that.

However to let me get back to my previous post (which was more than a rant than I wanted it to be ) First of, I am super excited that it is possible and I know that Uber is working really hard on the Commanders right now. I do however wish that when thats done they will start creating more terrain and map assets and give the biomes themselves some great updates.

The planets right now look decent. But not nearly as great as the early concept meshes they showed in the artbook. It may be easy Squishypony, but it needs to be done + it needs to look good and not out of place/blend with ground and thats the hard part especially considering procedural maps.

Its amazing that people are working on this, but it will still take a great amount of time before we get the really amazing maps.