I have a question that I couldn't find immediately addressed. Right now it appears that planet 'heights' are based on layers. There's the "sea level" layer, then you add and subtract layers from there. A good example is the plateaus - they're all the same height. You go from sea level to plateau height. I guess this is a really complicated way of asking if there's plans to feature hills, and sloped features rather than jarring changes in altitude with cliffs transitioning.
This appears to be just one of the desert biomes features. I kind of like it on a gameplay depth stand-point. Simplicity doesn't always equal bad, and complexity doesn't always equal gameplay depth. We haven't seen enough generated planets yet, nor are we far enough along, to definitively predict how the planets will look at launch. I would be willing to bet if its really important to you however, you will be able to generate a planet absolutely covered in rolling hills.
In the livestream they posted a few months back demoing the planet generator, they created a few planets with bumpy surfaces. So hills are definitely 100% confirmed. The desert biome just seems to be a very flat one.
don't be confused by technical jargon. TA and supcom both used layers as well. It's simply to differentiate between where different types of units can go. In this case, no matter the "level", ALL ground is the ground layer. And they said in a similar thread that there could be support for slopes and hills.
I small fear that I have is that it could be hard to make nice mountain on small planets. If you take the last livestream, having a big mountain on the planet would look weird.
Well, Olympus mons on mars quite visibly deforms the roundness of the planet, so that's just one of those things inherent to big mountains on small planets.
Since you'll eventually be able to create a planet with any shape you want (create a model in 3ds max for example) and import it in the game, its surely possible. The cliffs and the like they've showed are probably easier for gameplay since they're very visually distinct on a map with a curved surface compared to slopes. I guess its a design decision to have those cliffs instead, but I think we will get maps made by the community with wildly different terrain, since the engine allows arbitrary bodies. (Not just a bump map used to make hills as in other games. :mrgreen: )
Also worth noting is that the terrain elements shown are only a small selection of what will be available in the long run as they create more. Mike
There are 2 ways to get different terrain heights: • the planet's base mesh • CSG brushes What you're seeing is a perfectly spherical base mesh with no height differences, and CSG brushes (the plateaus) that are all specifically modeled to be the same height. All of this is totally editable and you have nothing to worry about. There are no layers or anything like that.
What syox has circled is a CSG subtraction brush. Brushes can add or subtract, and in this case it's a crater-shaped brush subtracting that area out of the planet. I'm 90% sure that's actually not affected by the height range slider. If you look close, that planet isn't perfectly spherical because it has some hills in the base terrain of the planet (example: one side of the crater is below sea level, and the other side of the crater has a big cliff). That's what the height range slider affects.
