L3DT Users' Community

I have a heightfield that's 32,768x32,768. Most of it came out just like I want, but about 10% of it needs editing. Trouble is, loading the thing in Sapphire leads to an out of memory condition. Are there any tricks that will let me edit it?

Hi Trips,

I'm sorry, there's no fix to that problem yet. I'm still working on a way to do this without substantially hurting the rendering performance.

Best regards,
Aaron.

Is there any way I can specify at heightfield generation (plugin?) not to allow the terrain height to go below zero if e.g. the current design map pixel and all neighbors are at a height > 0? I'm really at a loss to understand why so much of my terrain is "under water".

Additional thought... what about allowing a region of the heightfield to be selected for editing (mouse select area, load just that area into Sapphire)?

Hi Trips,

I apologise for the delay in my reply.

Is there any way I can specify at heightfield generation (plugin?) not to allow the terrain height to go below zero if e.g. the current design map pixel and all neighbors are at a height > 0?

There's no nice way to do it, no. There's also currently no way for plugins to hook-into the main terrain generation algorithm, but I can add support for callback functions if you like.

I'm really at a loss to understand why so much of my terrain is "under water".

If you have no design map pixels with sub-zero altitudes, there can still be several reasons why the heightmap may be generated with some sub-zero heights. For example, the peak and fractal noise effects may displace the terrain below sea-level if the noise is set sufficiently high and the altitude is sufficiently near to sea-level in the design map. Furthermore, if you have high erosion set in the local area, you can have significant height loss if there is a down-hill path away from the affected pixels.

By the way, you can also offset your heightmap to remove these under-sea regions using the 'Operations->Heightfield->Change vertical range' menu option.

Additional thought... what about allowing a region of the heightfield to be selected for editing (mouse select area, load just that area into Sapphire)?

My current plans are for proper support for very large maps in Sapphire to be added later this year or early next, which is after the next release version but before the following release. Sapphire is a pretty complex codebase, so I'd rather avoid implementing any quick-fixes in the mean-time that may come back to bite me later. Sorry.

Best regards,
Aaron.