Height Range beyond 100

I would love to be able to have steep level layering like in TA and star craft, it adds a whole new level of strategy and technique to the gameplay. I think even SupCom had some degree of terrain strategy but my memory is hazy.

Subtle slopes make it hard to tell when terrain is in the way. I think having level elevations.. (I think its called terracing) would make the game amazing and I'm sure thousands of other people feel the some way and have made threads about it etc.

I am guessing the AI and unit mechanics may need a lot of alterations to effectively utilize terrain like this, it was a little dodgy in TA but it worked great most of the time, I really hope they do something about this.

Is it possible to import custom height maps?.. It looks like the heightmaps used for the main planet surface elevation in PA are very low resolution and by that I would assume they cannot make generative steep ledges for a terracing effect, but then I see terrain features which are placeable which have useable high res ledges and I assume these are possible to custom make and import? if so I'd like to learn about that.

anyways, if custom height maps are supported we can all get creative with all the different terrain simulations softs out there!

aye

Sadly the heightmap is the one part Uber has not yet made changeable. The high resolution things placed are CSG brushes. Those are cool for many use cases, but for more general terrain heights they are not really good.

I agree the missing heightmap control is a big issue of the map editor.

hmmm... I always thought it wasn't a heightmap

the height of the planet sorta is a heightmap. The csg on top of it add the feature that a heightmap alone would not support.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean cola? I read that the height map is generated procedurally using simplex noise, which would suggest that it is possible to sample an image instead of using the noise function.

But I hadn't read about what csg is until now, it looks quite powerful in the way it seamlessly integrates with the landscape and I'm really interested in making my own, can you point me to any good tutorials/starting points?

You are exactly right with that afaik.

Make your own csg? Somebody in the modding forums tried did and maybe succeeded. Maybe there is something there. I remember @Bsport was involved, but somebody else was it who wrote "I did it, yey".

Even if Uber did implement a possibility to alter the heightmap (Simplex noise is an absolutely poor choice for terrain btw) the planet mesh has to have enough resolution to support proper terrain changes like in that picture above. The most awesome thing would be adaptive resolution in this case.

Adaptive resolution or might as well just allow custom mesh import, then we could do our own adaptive resolution remeshing/ topology stuff and PA could then texture it and allow csg. I am dreaming ofcourse, I don't know what kind of standards/requirements the base/terrain mesh for a pa planet is formatted in.

Oh wait, you all missed that great thread about terrain height maps?
The one where @exterminans gave some pretty smart answers, why Uber does not use custom height maps?
If so yous should start reading here, but I would recommend to read the whole thread.

seems I'm not longer the bumper-in-chief...

I don't remember well, but I seem to recall at some point the developers saying way back around alpha that terrain archways would be possible, which would mean that a heightmap isn't being used at all.

the csg makes that possible. You have a basic height map based planet and on top of that you add csg based stuff. Units can walk around on csg all they want, including below it. The heightmap provides the base below the csg.

I see