Editor Improvements

[ColtonD719]

Hey JLV,

1. Improved Brush Response
I'm not sure if this is entirely due to the game or my system, but when drawing with the raise/lower/smooth/etc. tools in the editor, the brush can't keep up with my movements. I really started noticing this when I got a tablet in hopes of speeding up my rut building, but I have the same issue with a mouse. For example, I'd like to be able to quickly draw a smooth curve, like this:


But instead, I get this:


The first smooth circle actually took 15 seconds to draw. You can imagine how this can end up eating a lot of time when painting ruts on an entire national track. In Photoshop and other graphics programs I can draw quick smooth circles no problem. I'd like to be able to do the same inside the editor.


2. In Game Lighting Adjustments
On a separate note, I'd love a way to adjust the lighting angle from within the game (color would be cool too). When working on the terrain, sometimes the lighting hits in a way that obscures what you're working on, but it's a hassle to tab out and guess some XYZ numbers to throw in the lighting file. I have an Excel file that converts azimuth and elevation to XYZ vector, as that makes a lot more sense to my brain. It would be amazing to have azimuth and elevation sliders in the editor. See below for a mockup. If you could change the lighting in realtime, that would be A+, but even just being able to input values then click an "update shading" or similar button from inside the editor would be a huge workflow improvement.


Thanks for the consideration!

[Mr. Wiggles]

+1
I use earth sculptor lighting to get different angle of light

[Bradclay306]

those Changes colton would be a huge step forward. also the implementation of layers like in Adobe would be great imo for adding premade to tracks.

[jlv]

The reason it's slow is there's a lot of stuff precalculated to make rendering the terrain easier. When the terrain changes all of that has to be re-calculated which is slow. Could probably be faster if the editor had its own special renderer for the special case of looking directly down at the terrain with no perspective but there are more important things to do than that.

[ChuZ__]

Hey JLV,

1. Improved Brush Response
I'm not sure if this is entirely due to the game or my system, but when drawing with the raise/lower/smooth/etc. tools in the editor, the brush can't keep up with my movements. I really started noticing this when I got a tablet in hopes of speeding up my rut building, but I have the same issue with a mouse. For example, I'd like to be able to quickly draw a smooth curve, like this:


But instead, I get this:


The first smooth circle actually took 15 seconds to draw. You can imagine how this can end up eating a lot of time when painting ruts on an entire national track. In Photoshop and other graphics programs I can draw quick smooth circles no problem. I'd like to be able to do the same inside the editor.


2. In Game Lighting Adjustments
On a separate note, I'd love a way to adjust the lighting angle from within the game (color would be cool too). When working on the terrain, sometimes the lighting hits in a way that obscures what you're working on, but it's a hassle to tab out and guess some XYZ numbers to throw in the lighting file. I have an Excel file that converts azimuth and elevation to XYZ vector, as that makes a lot more sense to my brain. It would be amazing to have azimuth and elevation sliders in the editor. See below for a mockup. If you could change the lighting in realtime, that would be A+, but even just being able to input values then click an "update shading" or similar button from inside the editor would be a huge workflow improvement.


Thanks for the consideration!

Hey JLV would you still consider doing the shading side of what Colton has suggested would be pretty cool sometimes I have to scratch my brain with the lighting and they way I look at stuff!

[jlv]

Hey JLV would you still consider doing the shading side of what Colton has suggested would be pretty cool sometimes I have to scratch my brain with the lighting and they way I look at stuff!

Actually, what I wrote here is no longer true:

The reason it's slow is there's a lot of stuff precalculated to make rendering the terrain easier. When the terrain changes all of that has to be re-calculated which is slow. Could probably be faster if the editor had its own special renderer for the special case of looking directly down at the terrain with no perspective but there are more important things to do than that.

Now it does the terrain lighting in the fragment shader that runs every frame. So it should be possible to move the sun vector and have the shading instantly update. Now that I think about it it shouldn't have been a show stopper before either. There would have been some lag as re-drew all the terrain textures but if you just wanted to get a different view for editing it wouldn't have been unbearable.

Anyway, I'm right in the middle of some major updates now so I'm not going to do it right now. But it's definitely possible now. Once I have the terrain renderer rewritten there are a lot of things people are going to have to remind me about!

[ChuZ__]

Oh yes new updates sound quite exciting cant wait! What have you been up to lately with these updates anything exciting?

[jlv]

Oh yes new updates sound quite exciting cant wait! What have you been up to lately with these updates anything exciting?

A custom shader for tilemap rendering. It lets me draw the entire tilemap with two triangles instead of millions like before. Makes for much faster terrain texture updates.