Platinum Arts Sandbox - Free 3D Game Maker Forum

Ok, I'm pretty new to the Sandbox Game maker and had a question on enviroment creation. When I get on the default maps, they have a pretty natural flow to them. None of the land is prefect and boxy (no perfect sqaures, or rectangles or anything). When I'm in the custom map making feature (adding a new custom map) I can only manage to make everything a box, a perfect box. The disables me from making hills, mountains, natural looking lakes/ponds, and thats cutting out a lot of it for me. I'm not an experienced scripter or game writer but I love to work with enviroment creation. So if anyone has any idead of what I should do, or what I'm even talking about please let me know.

Examples

Lakes - I can make a lake with perfect shore lines instead of squigly natural looking shore lines

Hills - I am unable to make hilles because it would just be a giant box jutting out of the ground, either that or It would look like giant stairs if I were to make a way up it.

U can use "q" button to make hills , but u can hold down "g" to make your grid bigger and its very helpful.

Madfox

Thanks, the hill tip worked but any idea on the lake shore lines? Making them more natural?

I'd suggest the use of blendmaps, the old maps use a somewhat less "flowy technique"

just press P to enter the mode, and click to paint

What is "blendmaps" exactly? I don't believe I have ever heard of it.

When you hit F2 you'll notice that some textures have a small square that looks like another texture inside of it. That means if you select that texture, it has a paint brush mode to it. Just hit P and you can literally start painting on the bigger texture with the appearance of that smaller texture. So you could essentially paint a beach In 2.3 the paint mode doesn't look that spectacular because it is kind of big and blocky but in our dev version it looks awesome! So great for making paths and such too! Take care!
-mike

So... from one texture creator to another... how do you create textures that are blendmap compatible?

Press the H key and your white grid will turn green. You are now in heightfield mode. Then scroll your middle mouse wheel to make hills,valleys,lake beds or ponds...

open your map's -art.cfg, you should see // {number} following every texture definition, this is the identity of the texture

you'll use /texlayer {That number} for the layer you'd want to assign to a texture

eg

texture 0 "my_texture.jpg" 0 0 0 1 // 6

texture 0 "My_other_texture.jpg" 0 0 0 1 // 7
texlayer 6