Plan for J. Donavan Stanley

Work on the TerrainManager continues to go well. The most recent build enables material painting on all the terrain blocks. There's one bug related to material painting left to track down and it(the painting) will be finished.

Here's some of what's in the works it's not the full list but it's what currently has priority. If anyone has thoughts or suggestions feel free to comment.


Extending the number material groups from 8 to 16. The first 8 will be global materials, the second will be specific to each terrain block. This is a first step towards adding the ability to load and unload terrain materials on the fly.

Adding a new mission wizard that will let you specify an existing hightmap and build terrain blocks from it. (i.e. give it a 512x512 height map it builds a 2x2 block of terrain files).

Enhancing the above and allowing the creation of new heightmaps larger than 256x256 and performing terraforming operations on the heightfield as a whole.

Adding support for using dml files to list textures for terrain. This should make using default texture sets for terrain easier.

The ability to "paint" flags on the terrain. For example you could paint an byte flag on the terrain containing values of either 0 or non-zero. Then when the player wishes to move into a terrain area you can query the flag and if it's non-zero stop the player from entering it.