Hey all! I have just begun playing around with the Esenthel worldbuilding tools and for the most part I have been quite impressed. I work at a game studio as a level designer for a living, so I've worked with a lot of terrain tools before. One thing ive noticed that Esenthel is majorly lacking is a proper layering system. In most modern terrain systems, you are able to set up terrain texture "layers", similar to in photoshop or other 2d image tools. By arranging the layers in a certain order, you can ensure that certain textures will appear ontop of others and vice versa. For example, you could set up your layers like this: road, stone, dirt, grass. This way, your road texture would always appear ontop of everything else, even if you happen to paint "over" it with another layer. Trust me, once you've had a terrain system with proper layering, it is very difficult to go back.

Another thing ive noticed is that the esenthel terrain system seems to paint along vertexes rather than using a newer texture splatting type system (I could be wrong, perhaps your splatting system lines up perfectly with the vertexes on the terrain?). I would highly suggest moving to a newer style splatting system with adjustable splat texture resolutions per material. This way you could specify low resolution maps for basic textures such as grass and stone to improve performance, and specify higher resolution maps for materials such as roads, etc where more precision is required.

I hope to be spending a lot more time in Esenthel in the near future as I plan to use it for a hobby RPG project. See you around!

It would be a great idea, i'd like this

+1

These are good ideas.

(04-29-2011 12:04 AM)zetto Wrote:  I would highly suggest moving to a newer style splatting system with adjustable splat texture resolutions per material.

+1

Also having documentation/the ability to do this in-game.


[Edit]

I'm not sure but this might be able to be done with Custom WE.

+1 would be great indeed

(04-29-2011 07:53 PM)llynx Wrote:  I'm not sure but this might be able to be done with Custom WE.

Anything can be done in the Custom WE. You have the source codes so anything is possible, assuming you have the time.

(04-29-2011 12:04 AM)zetto Wrote:  Another thing ive noticed is that the esenthel terrain system seems to paint along vertexes rather than using a newer texture splatting type system

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I think -texture splatting type system- exist in the form of Import Material Map in world editor. You can import RGBA map and to each channel you can add different material.....or zetto thought of something else?