Remember Height 150 Planets? Can I Haz?

Remember that post a while ago that featured some height 150+ planets?

They're awesome!

Back during the early days of Planetary Annihilation, units would have a tough time dealing with hills. However, the other day they seemed to do just fine on planets with the cliffs and hills. I tried doing some experimenting with greater height ranges, but they wouldn't render in game. :-(

But... can I haz?



A height 150 planet. It looks so awesome. And looks so much fun. The terrain variety would impact gameplay, and I think in a good way. Hide your units on the other side of a hill if you're outnumbered. Or put some artillery behind the hill for some extra protection as the enemy ants would have to crest the hill before firing.

Or, if we wanted to add more to the game, make it so hills block line of sight and maybe even radar. So you could use hills to hide bases, defensive lines, sneak attacks... it'd be so awesome!



Giant mountains next to the ocean



Rolling hills near a lake



a deep valley between two mountains



Another mountain



And for funsies, a height 900 planet.

This + cliffs. IMO, a terrain update would go quite a way toward making PA feel "finished" and polished for release.

YES. YES. YES.

And here's the cliffs biome mod if anyone hasn't seen it already.

WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA.
HOLD THE F(EFF)ING PHONE.
THE CLIFF MOD ADDS IN NATURAL STRUCTURES?!

BRB DOWNLOADING.

How the heck did I not see this mod earlier. So far I haven't really touched mods in general since I've bee waiting for them to move away from just modifying the UI. Didn't think we'd have something like this till the server code was provided to us.

I am 100% on board.

First, they need to make it so that you can actually SEE slight terrain differences from a top-down view.

As of now, no one can tell if something is higher or lower except by looking at it from the horizon.

Stop poking holes in it.

Just gimme!

Disclaimer; those temples are already in the game files, just unused so far.
I decided to put them in with the cliff planets because they look cool, the cliffs cut through them in interesting ways, and because when scaled up to that extent they can have a pretty cool effect of cutting off certain paths and allowing others, and are large enough to allow you to build quite a few buildings within their walls and set up defenses.

This can be achieved by incorporating height or slope dependent decals / gradients into the terrain system. Lava planets already do this to some extent, for instance (although it's only from 'dark' to 'light' areas).
As for cliffs; let's say I was able to create custom brushes for my mod. Not sure if I can yet (especially since I use blender), but hopefully this will be possible at some point.
I could make the texture change colour between the flatter base and the steeper, un-pathable cliff face. Imagine the flat, base part of the cliff brush being green, and the cliff face part being browish; I could also give the cliff face colour a gradient from brown to grey as the cliff rises higher. This way, you can tell if the cliff is path-able by looking for brown or grey cliff faces at a location, and you can judge the height of the cliff by how 'grey' it gets at the top. Just as an example.

I don't know, I mean my mods post is on the front page on a regular basis. and as I write this it still is. I need some people to go post over there for visibility.

WOW, these structures and more terrain variety is what vanilla pa abso-FREAKIN-lutely needs.

And dead cities. Don't forget dead cities. It doesn't make sense at all that we're fighting over a galaxy once inhabited by massive civilisations and every planet we fight over is rural and empty.

PA sorely needs this...The base maps feel lifeless...needs serious lovn lol
Where is the link to dlin this mod?!

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-custom-planet-type-cliffs.60787/

And here's a video of the mod in action.

That looks cool! Does the terrain affect gameplay? Can we test this mod out tonight?!

This isn't a mod. Simply increase the terrain height in the system editor. However, if you load the system into a game, the terrain height is lowered.

Don't really know how much the terrain alters gameplay since we can't play with it yet.

Uber should put this in the top of there list. Terrain should effect game play in a major way

More interesting terrain features is on Uber's list. But they have a big list...

Hopefully we start to see changes soon. In most wars terrain has often been the deciding factor. No rts game has fully implemented terrain causing it to have an effect on game play.

Hey brian, do me a favor and render a cliff planet with 150 height variation, and then post screenshots. Thanks!