Fix terraforming!!

[Dontaze_Mebro]

He says he spent 2 hours trying to figure it out... Maybe he should take up scavenging?

[Deacon]

I can level the ground. It took about a week in beta to learn the tricks to doing it. It is still tedious and time consuming tho, so no easy button here. It's also way too much hassle trying to explain in forums how to do it, I dont even like trying to tell guildies how. Guess I'm not good at teaching.

[Derek]

Leveling up 0.10 is much easier than leveling down 0.10. I agree that having two separate buttons for leveling would help ease the tedium.

[Andius]

Level function does work but not as well as it should. I've gotten to a point where I am pretty proficient at leveling but I have still run into some cases where there are those two tiles at 513.00 and I want the ground at 512.90 and for some reason despite doing everything the way I normally do it, the 13.00 was spreading like a plague until I lowered terrain in the center of it and used it to fill in the hole, finally leveling out the terrain. It still took a good 10-20 minutes of fighting the level feature to do what should have been a 10 second job.

The level feature isn't realistic, its not done well, its just frustrating. When I go out and I am trying to level a piece of ground I know before I start whether that ground will go up or down. I don't remove dirt when I want the ground raised or add it when I want it lowered.

Given this is the second game I have ever played with terraforming, and it is an immensely popular feature in both (And actually works perfectly in other), re-working terraforming to be a little more user friendly feature needs to be one of this games top priorities if it wants to retain many of the players who come to check it out.

It could do this with a level up/level down feature as suggested. It could do it by allowing the user to set a target level that the game will favor when trying to level land. It could even change dirt so what is currently 1 dirt is now 5 dirt and allow a slightly raise, or slightly lower feature that will raise or lower the land to the nearest .10 altitude.

I don't care how its done, if I was running Xsyon my current priorities would be:

1. Lag issues
2. Major bugs like the inventory window bugs
3. Making terraforming more realistic/less rage inducing

[xyberviri]

Perhaps all the lag is being caused by people who dont know how to terraform and are therefore lagging out the server with them repeatedly spamming the leveling command. personally i dont understand why its so hard for them to code a simple, make X be the level im standing on. around me. no averaging no nothing else, if your standing on the edge of something it shouldn't magically make more dirt to bring the edge up it should just simply level everything around you with a 0.1-.09 difference maybe

[yoori]

Terraforming works great for me, but you have to know/learn how to do it.
I won't tell you how to do it becouse it would be wall of text(I'm lazy) and you probably wouldn't understand with my english skills.

[jokhul]

Good to know that it actually takes real SKILL to level ground using terraforming.

At least there's some things in game that don't require a single button click...

[jumpshot]

People probably wouldn't give smartass answers if other people didn't refer to things they don't understand as "broke."

[vorg]

There is another thread on this, but I'll post here also. The problem is the resolution the game works at. When you raise/lower you move whole units at a time. But terrain elevation shows to .01 and likely works at an even finer level. So you can't imply raise/lower a spot to make it match other areas like you can in Wurm. So it will divided up the dirt for the current tile to .01 or what ever elevation to even it out which will hardly ever match the surounding area. Some times the average is higher and some times it's lower. The fix is fairly simple.

First, the amount of dirt moved in raise/lower, did not always seem the same. Maybe that was just where I was working, maybe it was a bug. But it should move the same amount each time.

Decrease the weight of dirt by 1/10 and increase that max stack size x10. Basicly increase the resolution of what you are doing.

Assuming elevation is also in meters (though at times it seems like maybe it's not) have raise/lower move 1 at a time (10 dirt). This would allow normal size changes without increasing the work to do it 10 fold.

Add a sprinkle/trim option that would move only .1 dirt at a time for finer control over work. .1m would be about 3.94"

When the terraforming window is open, turn on a grid that show the tile edges for 5-10m around the char. This will make it much easyer to see at a glance where work is needed. Some textures make it really hard to see, such as snow.

When flattening, it might be good if it can auto add/remove 1-2 dirt from players inventory to flatten. But as this game does elevation differently then wurm, I am now inclined to not have it add/remove dirt from the player but work with what it has. With a grid showing, and an option to drop smaller amounts of dirt, it would be a simple mater of dropping a small amount and have it spread that allowing leveling to better then .1m. For example, if the tile is .05 lower then the next tile, sprinkle 2 dirt (which would raise that corner .2) and reflatten. Those 2 dirt would be divided up and raise the 4 corners .05.

Oh, another problem is that here when you raise/lower, you move the whole tile, all 4 corners. This makes it hard to do nice ramps. Would be better if raise/lower worked on corners instead of whole tiles and only have flatten work on whole tiles.

[Dubanka]

as someone who has committed an extensive amount of time in the last few days to digging and building land formations, I can tell you that it isn't broken, it works, but requires a bit of patiences to get right. Just remember you're not dealing with blocks or tiles of land, but are dealing with polygons, and when you terraform you're adjusting a polygonnal mesh.

and while there isnt a 'level up' or 'level down' command, you can determine which you want to do by where you do it. The leveling action brings the level of ground you're on, to the level around it....if you are on high ground, it will lower it. If you're on low ground, it will raise it. If you're on a 'soft' edge, it will collapse it.

But it really just takes patience.