Hi Andy,
To me it looks like the two tiles at that edge are following one another, but one is scaled higher than the other. This could be the old 'mosaic walls' bug:
http://www.bundysoft.com/docs/doku.php?id=l3dtvi2:buglist:mosaicwalls
One cause for the tile scales to become de-synched is when L3DT forgets to 'unify' the tile scaling of the heightfield after a calculation. Normally this is automatic, but it's possible I've missed a calculation. The manual option is (I think) 'utilities->unify mosaic scales'.
I apologise for being a bit slow here, but could you describe the export path you used? Was the heightfield exported as tiled RAW files? Were the tiles edited in some way?
I just found out why I can't get "detail textures" to work in L3DT. It's not actually L3DT at all, since it shows up correctly in the viewer.
Ah, that's kind of different. The viewer applies it's own detail texture. In fact, now that you remind me, that's the way detail maps are usually done; you modulate your relatively low resolution texture with a high resolution detail map at render-time to make it look pretty up close. I think, from vague memory, that the detail map in L3DTVi2 is baked on at 64x resolution relative to the heightfield (it might be higher). This has to be done in the renderer, and not L3DT, because the sort of resolutions required to look good (e.g. 64x, 128x, 256x) would result in colossal texture sizes. For instance, a 1024x1024 heightfield with a 128k x 128k texture
might just fit on a DVD (~48Gb if bitmap, pro'ly a few GB if JPEG'd). Instead, you make your 4x or 8x texture (48Mb to 192Mb bitmap), and apply a detail map (a few hundred kBs) at 128x. The results are normally quite passable, and that's why the technique is so widely used.
Now, making the super-large textures as mentioned above is in fact a technique that is becoming more popular in recent times, or perhaps less outrageous, due to advances in mip/clipmapping for handling very large maps (see the hoopla over '
megatextures'.) Anyway, the massive unique texturing capabilities of Atlas can support textures of this scale, and at high framerates, but you still have to deal with the distribution problem that the map files are gigabyte+ per level.
Also, in order to make my terrains look less blurry in TSE, I have increased the UV scales. Is this dangerous? Some of them default at 0.5 and others are 1.0. If I move it up to 50.0000 it shows more detail.
Ah, that would presumably be the way to set your detail map scaling. I'm not sure you would want to modify your U/V coordinates for your texture, as then features in the texture would no longer match the features in the heightfield, but if you add a detail texture in modulation mode (however that's done in TSE), and set the U/V scales to ~50, you should be cooking on gas. You're right in that there is a danger, though. If you make the scaling too large, you will in all likelihood start to see features in the detail map repeating into the distance. This is the eternal problem in using small, tiling textures across large surfaces. The approach used in L3DTVi2 is to apply the detail map twice (I can't remember, maybe 64x and 128x, I dunno). This masks the repeating fairly well.
Just for completeness; the reason detail maps are also supported in L3DT was that I found when testing 16x/32x textures, I needed to apply some additional detail at the mid resolutions (~8x) to make it less bland. The grass land types, and I think the snow as well, have a detail map at around 8x res.
PLUGIN - Does the new plugin you're working on work with Atlas editor directly?
To be honest, I don't know. My fields of responsibility are building the UI, making sure L3DT provides the right data to the plugins, and providing the right functions to the plugin API to manipulate the data. The actual Atlas-specific bits are being written way over in Oregon by the Atlas gurus, and taking Gandalf's advice, I "do not meddle in the affairs of wizards." Anyway, I think it's probably better that I refrain from discussing the particular details of the plugin until GarageGames have released it for testing.
Cheers,
Aaron.