Ok I just watched the broadcast video from August 14th Where the team was showing off the new metal and Lava planets, and I couldn't help but notice while showing off the Lava planet, the settings that were used to create the early implementation of Lava is some that we dont have and looks like its been taken out in the newer versions of the system editor. If you skip to around the 24th minute mark, you can clearly see in the screenshot slides their showing there is 2 extra features, BIOME scale and RESOURCES. Are we going to be getting those additional sliders either in the beta or retail? or was that something that is for dev tools only? Reason I ask is because those early screenies of the lava where you can clearly see the hight of the landscape and the lava being in an almost pit-like geometry was a hell lot more realistic then what we ended up with so far. In the video you had rocks, broken ground with the lava seeping through the cracks, the biomes are raised high all over the place, the general terrain was raised over the lava which game it a much more realistic look to where the impression is the land had broken off into the lava rather then it all being on the same height like water. The earlier pictures were better then what ended up being the in the alpha which I think was because of the extra sliders that we currently dont have. I just thought I'd ask and mention it looked better before you started messing around with how the terrain and lava textures meet, they shouldn't meet and be connected like it is
Those sliders were in early alpha but removed (They are still in the code, but commented out). The resources one is likely to be added back in some form; not sure what the Biome scale was used for. The "pits" you mentioned are actually just meshes made to look like pools of lava; this was changed after the first lava planet refresh (in my opinion, the hard edges and obvious repeated shapes made them look far worse than the current iteration).
Thanks for the reply raevn, yeah I wasn't sure but kind of thought they had been, I hope they come back and as for the hard edges, a little difficult to tell from the video just how bad they might have been, but you'll definitely want the landscape to be taller then lava, the reason for this is lava doesn't act the same way as water does, its not a wave, it just simply consumes everything it comes in contact with. If their of the same height the lava would just simply roll inland with nothing to stop it, so raised geometry its critial for the lava planet. Cant currently make it do that in the alpha, the height sliders do next to nothing except determine how much land vs lava there is.
There is any resource explaining how to use the System Editor? Specially, how do I reduce all those cracks in the terrain?
There are now METAL QUANTITY and METAL CLUSTERS attributes, but I suspect they don't do anything. I'm not entirely sure what BIOME SCALE does.
I tried playing with water and height levels, and they not seem to have any influence on the number and size of the crackers.
Try to set high temperature and play around water level. You'll find balance where 1200 meters planet will only have ~10 cracks.
