Terrain Editing

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This month's Tech Tip will assist world owners with the basics on using the world Terrain feature. World terrain can be manipulated directly with the mouse by any citizen who has CT (caretaker) rights in the world. They merely have to right-click on the bare terrain of their world (make sure Terrain is enabled in your world's Options Menu) to select a single 10X10 meter terrain square and to view the "Edit Terrain" properties pop-up box as seen below:

As you can see in the above illustration, when you right-click on the terrain, the square that is selected has a red outline around it. That square also shows the individual building cell that occupies each terrain square. The small yellow outlined square in the bottom left corner (southeastern corner) of the selected terrain square indicates which corner will be moved when you change the Elevation of that terrain square. It shows that you actually manipulate the intersection of 4 different terrain squares when you change the elevation level in the pop-up box.:

In the above pic, you can see what happens when you use the small up and down scroll arrows for each of the two controls on the Edit Terrain pop-up box (Elevation and Textures). It's now set for 3.50 meters above the default ground (see how the corner on the bottom left has risen up?) and it now displays texture # 1 (instead of #0 which is the default). Your world must have a set of textures in it's OP Textures folder named in this series: terrain0.jpg, terrain1.jpg, terrain2.jpg etc all the way up to terrain62.jpg maximum. Those numbers will show in the Textures scroll box of the Edit Terrain pop-up box for you to select just what texture you want for each terrain square in your world.

While a terrain cell is selected, there are also several keyboard shortcuts available to make terrain editing easier:

• + and - on numeric keypad raises and lowers the terrain cell by one half meter. Holding Shift reduces the increment to 5 centimeters. Holding Shift and Ctrl adjusts the terrain height by a barely visible 1 centimeter.
  
• Page Up and Page Down rotate the terrain texture by 90 degrees to the left or right.
  
• Home and End cycle up and down through terrain textures.
  
• The arrow keys move the current selection one cell forward, back, left, or right.
  
• The 5 key on the numeric keypad resets the currently selected terrain cell to the state it was in when you first selected it.
  
• Ctrl-C makes a copy of the currently selected terrain cell's elevation and texture.
  
• Ctrl-V pastes the texture of the last copied terrain cell to the current selection (but not the elevation.)
  
• Ctrl-B pastes both the texture and elevation of the last copied terrain cell to the current selection.

While editing terrain, it is often useful to enable the cell grid (PF10) in order to better visualize how the terrain is broken up into cells.

Terrain Holes:

There is one other feature you will see on the Edit Terrain box and that's a small checkbox labeled "Hole". If you check that box and then close the Edit Terrain box, the terrain square for that area will be deleted. This is really handy for making cave and stairway entrances that allow the visitor to pass through the world's terrain without resorting to warping or teleporting them through like what was necessary with the old, pre-3.3 world ground objects. To restore a deleted terrain square, simply right click select on an adjoining existing terrain square next to the hole and press an arrow key on your keyboard to move a new copy over the hole. You must then uncheck the "Hole" checkbox before closing the Edit Terrain box for the square to appear.

~Ewasx~