Sometimes when I try to see the terrain inside the Explorer View, what I see is something like this:
Is this a bug or something that I am doing wrong?
Hi there,
it may or may not be a bug. That is the classic look of devices that are not fully compatible with Explorer mode. What this means is that the device doesn’t maintain heights correctly across tile boundaries. WM will flag devices like this with a “!” character by the name of the device. If one of these is used in your network, then it will produce the kind of behavior you see here.
Note that in 1.2, the gradient and radial gradient are now “Explorer safe” when in world coordinate mode, reducing the cause of this kind of effect to old worlds, unstabilized perlin noise, a few effects devices, or the gradient generators set to “Local” coordinate mode.
...radial gradient are now "Explorer safe"...
Well, when I set a radial gradient to WORLD, I can’t see it inside the terrain. I tried to change the X and Y values, but I can’t manage to see it. What should I do?
Just click on “Set to current”, in the radial gradient properties 
Just click on "Set to current", in the radial gradient properties :)
Thanks, but that didn’t help.
Er… It works for me…
When clicking on “set to current”, it will set the gradient coordinates to the current coordinates of the white box which defines the location of the terrain.
So this gradient will appear in this white box.
After having set the location to current, click on the “view” button in the explorer to go to the white box, and the gradient should appear there ?
Well, in order to be see the effect that I want when I change it from local to World, I need to increase its properties a lot, but then the effect is not the same. Here, look at this pic, it is suppose to be like the pyramid that you can see behind:
It might help to understand the difference between Local and World mode better:
When in Local mode, everything is related only to the current terrain box that you are using. A value of 0.5, 0.5 will be the center of the terrain box, etc.
When you use Explorer mode to look over the larger terrain, or you use the panning/zooming controls in the world size dialog to change the size or location of the terrain box, a device in Local mode doesn’t change anything.
So if the device was a gradient that went from 1 on the left to 0 on the right, in local mode panning the view 0.5 units to the right would change nothing – the gradient would still be value 1 on the left and value 0 on the right.
One side effect of Local mode is that in Explorer mode you get “repeating” effects. This is more of an artificial illusion than anything, because if you locate the terrain box over some of these “duplicate” terrain features, you won’t see anything like what it looks like. This is because, again, Local mode doesn’t respect scaling or panning instructions.
In world mode, to contrast, this is no longer true. The location of the center of effect is now specified by the origin box in the upper-left corner of the device’s parameters. If you were originally viewing the default terrain square, and then you panned the camera 0.5 units to the right, you would see the left side of the gradient having value 0.5, the middle having value 0, and the right side also clipped to value 0.
Notice then, that for any of the gradient types, you won’t actually see the gradient itself in world mode unless your terrain square is near the origin of the gradient.
When you have effects composed by way of local-mode gradients or other things like that, they tend to produce very confusing/non-sensical results in Explorer mode or anytime the terrain is panned or scaled. Local mode is honestly only implemented to a) maintain compatibility with older WM versions, and b) for the times when you want to create an effect without regard to the larger world.
Looks like the “pyramid” in the front was deformed by an equalizer or something.
Looks like the "pyramid" in the front was deformed by an equalizer or something.
Yes, but the only thing that I did was to change from local to World and to increase its radius.