Setting exact world size?

Bug Reports
#1

Hello all,

first of all, let me say that WM really rocks! :smiley:
The way how it builds worlds is just what I was looking for - I like it a lot! 8)

I want to use WM to make heightmaps for my 3D-engine “Ca3DE”, which is a real-time, multi-player 3D engine similar in spirit to Doom3 - please see http://www.ca3d-engine.de for details. One of the nice features of Ca3DE is that it supports very large terrains, and I want to use WM to create such terrains for Ca3DE. (Some simple examples are shown at http://www.ca3d-engine.de/c_ScreenShots.php , especially at the very bottom of the page.)

However, I’m very new to WM, and I was wondering if and how I can set a world size “exactly”.

That is, what I really want in the end is a heightmap of 10251025 pixels, with a scaling of 1 meter/pixel, so that an area of 10241024 m^2 is covered.
The height range from fully black to fully white should map from 0 to 200m.

I’ve already figured out that WM does not work well with such small dimensions (e.g. the 3D previews), and so my next attempt was to scale everything up by a factor of 10.
That is, having a heightmap of 10251025 cover 1024010240 m^2, height range from 0 to 2000m.

Now, the real problem is how I can actually set these numbers? The “World Size & Positioning” dialog just has a slider named “Largest World Size”, and the closest to 10240m that I can set with it is 10.86 km.
A similar problem exists with the “Terrain Height Scale” in the left bar - 2040m is the closest that I can set.

:arrow: What can I do?
I’d also be happy if there is a work-around, e.g. can I hex-edit the .tmd file in order to set other numbers :?:

Oh, and for completeness: Also e.g. the Clamp device has a similar issue: The clamp heights (from, to) can be set individually, and they show three digits after the decimal, but only two digits can actually be set, i.e. entering 0.020 is possible, but 0.024 is rounded back to 0.020.

I’d be very grateful for any tips, hints, help or advice! :wink:

#2

I’d do this stuff in TerraGen. :slight_smile:

#3

Well, the problem is that although the underlying mathematical concepts of mapping heightmaps to physical units are simple, almost all programs that you can find that deal with terrains and heightmaps do subtle things incompatibly and slighly differently from each other - and I’ve tried plenty.

Good thing is that the dimensions (meters per pixels etc.) don’t really play a big role at all, but I’d still be happy to get them right right from the start. :slight_smile:

(More important for several purposes like some filter devices is probably the ratio between width and height, e.g. a size of 1024m and height range of 200m has the same ratio as 10240m / 2000m, but just not the same as 10860m / 2040m…)

#4