L3DT Users' Community

I've been playing around with customizing design maps and I think that map layer would benefit a lot from having a two tools that already exist in the heightmap layer:

Raise to
Lower to

I believe these could be a major timesaver when you want to make shallow shorelines or just wish to raise / lower things below or above a certain altitude. If you want big mountains in an island environment, it usually means you end up with a very deep seabed which is not always desirable. I'm aware you could raise it all in the heightmap layer but doing it before generation means you still get the randomization of your parameters.

Hi BadLuckBurt,

I apologise for my slow reply. I've put these requests on the dev plan.

If you want big mountains in an island environment, it usually means you end up with a very deep seabed which is not always desirable.

That could be due to erosion. The virtual water in the erosion algorithm, when running off a mountain, will scour a trench at the base of the slope, a bit like the plunge pool at the bottom of a waterfall. This problem won't be fixed by changing how you edit the design map altitude layer; it's a side-effect of the erosion algorithm and the steepness of the mountain. I may be able to modify the erosion algorithm to reduce this effect, but that will take some time. You could also try reducing the erosion setting for the pixels near the shoreline (on the mountainside).

Thanks again for the requests.

Best regards,
Aaeon.

Hi Aaron,

No worries, thank you for providing some info / suggestions and considering my request

From what I've observed it has to do with 3 sliders in the design map parameters:

1. average height (actual name escapes me but it's the first slider, the one that let's you set the land / sea average.
2. altitude range
3. feature vastness

If I set average height to around sea-level, set an altitude range of 4 marks and set feature vastness to a very high range, I will end up with one or more large 'mountains' about 2-3km high but also 2-3km deep sea because of how the settings interact with each other and the average height setting so the algorithm does what it's supposed to do and it happens with little to no erosion too.

'Raise to' and 'Lower to' are ideal to correct those kind of problems on a large scale without destroying neighbouring pixels that do have an altitude in the range you want there.