[SOLVED] Large terrain team building

[demostenes]

I am trying to design most effective worldbuilding process for our level design team. Goal is to allow several independent level designers to modify one large world in parallel. I was checking structure of world files and since mask, diffuse and normal textures are in very small chunks, this part is not big problem, each of them can work on his part of map and we just merge files from time to time via version control system.

 

But I see problem in editation of height map. We do majority of terrain work in external application, but still world need lots of hand tuning (for placing buildings, etc...). I noticed, that height map is imported into .ter files and when I modify part of map, only one .ter file is overwritten. So it looks like terrain is devided into parts too, which is good.

 

As a solution I see assigning to each level designer fixed part of world based on size of height map chunk, so we can easily merge their projects. So my question is, how this dividing algorithm works? Can we count somehow, which part of terrain (coordinates) belongs to which .ter file? My rough guess is each 2048*2048 part is one .ter file? Can we control size of .ter file?

 

Or is there any other possible workflow, how to allow team to work in one world in parralel? Does anybody have experience with deviding level design between more people? Thanks.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Check out layer nodes in the documentation. This is how we have multiple artists working on different terrain tiles - although i don't think you will be able to use this for multiple people working on one tile, this is only for multiple people working on multiple tiles/layers.

[Rob]

Hey Shane,

Do you just import the individual layer nodes when the artists are done?

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Hi Rob, yes you can do this. What we do is setup our world/node tree with the reuired layer nodes, place the terrain tiles we want as children of those nodes, save the world and allocate a layer to each artist. then when they open the world file they can see and edit tiles under each node - avoiding collisions with other artists. Savinfg the world will save changes to the layers also.

[manguste]

Jiri,

 

I'm afraid Shane is right, a terrain object is hardly designed for collaborative work, though it's possible to create a workaround.

 

First of all, about per-surface diffuse textures and masks. If you are going to modify them in 2D editors, that's perfectly OK. But if you are going to edit mask in the terrain editor, chances are you are going to draw outside the surface. Plus pixels on the border between two surfaces are averaged out (the same goes for heights) to avoid seams between surfaces. That means, editing one surface texture may result in textures of surfaces around the edited one modified as well.

 

As for heights, 64 surfaces are written into 1 .ter file. Plus there's one file to store common settings (max height, LODs, flatness, coarse textures to use). The possible pipeline for collaborative work:

• Common terrain settings are set up only once.
  
• Each artist that was working on separate surfaces then exports a height map.
  
• Create a USC script that calculates which tiles were modified and puts together a new height map. After that, it's imported again.
  

[demostenes]

Thanks. We will try to figure something out.