Terrain Editor Update - Beta 2

I’ve made a bunch of improvements and additions since the first beta. Hopefully the next time I post an update it’ll be the actual release. Let me know what you think of it. Hopefully at this point it can be potentially useful for real-world use cases, possibly even outside of GameMaker.

See also the last update notes.

tl;dr

• Even faster
• Viewer options
• Texture tool has been re-enabled and (mostly) behaves correctly
• General bug fixes

Functionality

• Most tasks are now carried out in a DLL, which is considerably faster than GML (up to 30x in some cases)
• Better and more brush types
• No more of that dumb “set mode” thing (why did I even make it that way in the first place?)

Deformation

• Added proper brushes; this produces better results than the generic circle/block from before
  • I added Juju’s avatar as a joke but it turns out it’s actually a really good brush for creating wrinkly terrain (insert obvious jokes about pugs here)
  • “Average” and “Zero” deformation modes also now take the brush shape into account
  • “Flat Average” has been removed
• Larger maximum brush radius, because editing in the DLL means that the size of the brush doesn’t have much of an influence on performance

Texture painting

• Has been re-enabled
• This is NOT part of the exported terrain data yet

Visuals

• Viewer settings have been put in their own little menu, because there are getting to be a lot of them
• View diffuse/position/normals/depth/barycentric coordinates of the terrain
• Added status messages to tell how long particular tasks such as generating or exporting terrain took

WIP items, and known issues

Some of the more minor things from the last dev log are still outstanding. Notably:

• Save/load project have yet to be implemented
  • Default project examples
• It still performs pretty well within reason (remember the last one?), but there are still things that could be done to make it perform quite a lot better, and to allow for much larger terrains
  • Exporting itself is still fairly slow because it processes the terrain in several passes; this does not have to be the case, and I’d like to smooth this out
  • In particular, obj export is pretty slow because it’s still done in GML instead of on the DLL; I’d like to change this
• Rearrange certain parts of the UI to reduce confusion
• More default brushes (the built-in GameMaker particles are actually really good for this kind of thing)
• Import your own brushes
• Import your own texture/tileset
• Export the paint canvas surface
• More procedural tools, especially for texturing
• Proper documentation
  • Helpful tooltips
• Lighting settings
• Some secret things

The final version might be out in about two weeks? Depends on how busy I am. Definitely by March.