Friday, July 29, 2011

Upcoming new feature of Moviestorm unveiled.

Today at the Moviestorm Dev Blog, the fine folks there shared a video showing the results of playing around with the nearly-developed Terrain Editor. According to the Dev Blog:

"The user interface has now been decided for this feature and the functionality is around 90% complete so it's time to move onto the other areas of improvement. Keep your eyes peeled for more updates!"

On the forums, more information was given, such as*:

  • The default mountains are now editable with the new tools so you can keep them if you want or edit them to produce a new landscape.
  • (The staff) have been experimenting with a larger grid, and have plans to include it in the next version of Moviestorm. It's worth noting that nav meshes can be used in conjunction with the terrain to make navigable areas outside of the grid if you like.
  • Characters are still, unfortunately, restricted to navigating on flat surfaces. However, characters are able to traverse stairs with nav meshes, so you could place a nav mesh under the terrain to make it look like that character was climbing a hill.
  • The terrain editor can only be used on the existing terrain mesh (which is relatively large anyway.
  • The terrain tools include a raise brush, a lower brush and tools to flatten, smooth and paint textures.
  • The terrain will ultimately be saved in stock sets for use by directors and as an example of what is possible with the new editor.

Here is the video:



Looks exciting! This certainly will open up new doors in set design, and the ability to flatten the entire terrain mesh will be of great benefit to those who wish to create more complex sets (such as a cityscape). Stay tuned!

*I largely quoted Amos over at Moviestorm, which explains the better prose. Anyway, the tool is still in development, and all things mentioned may change.

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