Hi Folks !

Here are some results I got from trying to use the Gamemaker Terrain editor 2 (GMTE2) for a Gamestudio terrain . The approach of the GMTE2 is a little different from the one MED uses. GMTE modifies the terrain and sprays a texture (soft borders) on it at the same time. You can quickly select another texture with rising or lowering the terrain, beside some other nice features. Check out GMTE2, its a free program. GMTE2 is patch/ texture tile oriented and originally made for use with Gamemaker (TM). However there is one anoying thing with GMTE2:. There is no undo function. MED has one, beside some other nice features.

Anyway, I created a terrain in GMTE2 succesfully and imported it in MED with the following parameters best, having in mind a single large terrain, like in the nice little car demo supplied with GST:

Create a new terrain in GMTE2 with the following parmeters:

Widh of terrain (in patches): 128
Height of new terrain(in patches): 256
Amount of patches per model: 16
Amount of texture pixels per patch: 16

Now select your textures and spray your terrain.

Export the terrain texture colormap.png with the following params:

Width (in pixels): 512
Height (in pixels): 1024

If an error message occours, press ignore.

Export the heightmap now, no params req.

Load the colormap.png from the GMTE2 main directory into your favourite paintprogram. The size of the colormap you will see is indicated as 513 x 1025 pixels. (Small flaw of the exporter ?, Don't know)
Resize it to 512 x 1024 pixels and finetune or change it as you like and then save it as a bmp or tga file, ready to be used for a terrain skin in MED.

Load the heightmap.png into your paintprogram. Again you need to rescale the 129x256 to 128x256. Add or change details to the heightmap and save it as a bmp. 128x256 for a heightmap may look very small to you, but it does well do the job.

Open MED and create a terrain from the heighmap.bmp via -->Import-->create terrain from image.
Set vertices horizontal to 80.
Set Vertices vertical to 160.
Set Traingle size horizontal to 100.
Set triangle size vertical to 100.

Now add the colormap.bmp terrain skin in the skin editor (File-->Import-->Skin Image).

Edit the terrain, add a detail skin or else, if needed.

Thats all.

I tried to us higher values for the terrain and terrain texture in GMTE2, but the values above seem to be the limit of GMTE2, well at least on my system/graphic card.

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I did this on an Athlon XP 1.2 GHZ, 1.5 GB Ram and an ATI Radeon 9600/X1050 256 MB, GST 7 Extra, MED 6.86

Best wishes !