Over the past 5 years I have created over 10 massive, detailed terrain maps for first person shooters Verdun and Tannenberg. Here is my most pressing feedback on the changes to the terrain tool.
- The keyboard shortcuts for levelling terrain (“set height”) and terrain smoothing have been removed or aren’t functioning, this should be fixed/added back.
- A lot of brush work detailing is done with the radius set from 3 to about 11, anything bigger than that is either roughing out the cover or roughing out large portion of terrain visually. The size slider for setting typical detail sizes like 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 are within a few millimetres from each other, for anything bigger than that it does not have to be exact. A different interaction design would be helpful here (preferably user made presets).
- The circle indicating the brush size is not useful for advanced users, I’d prefer this kind of thing to be optional. especially when doing final art passes where you’d evaluating colour and material usage, you want to see as little “editor” as possible while tweaking things.
- The enum drop-down tool select under the painting tab. Really when doing any serious terrain design work, you want at least 95% of your inputs be key based. Selecting any tool by mouse/pen is slow enough but this drop-down thing is about the slowest kind of usability I can think of. Please improve.
- Please default the tool “raise/lower terrain” when selecting the terrain gameobject.
Thanks for updating the terrain tool, I’m confident it will be much improved this year and I look forward to seeing what we can do with some of the new features.