Quote: "Standard and Pro versions - can you confirm what you're looking at putting in both now and/or price and/or eta?"
Standard version - £25 - October 2010 (after release of DBP 7.6)
Pro version is all undecided but price will be about £30 - £40 and release date will be later this year or early next year.
Quote: "Spherical Terrains - Standard or Pro? 4096x4096 max? How would you envisage the commands?"
Pro.
The max heightmap size will be 4096x4096x6 as there will be 6 heightmaps. (Blitzterrain will use cubed spheres to make it easy to implement, I can just use the current system but curve each terrain).
Only a few changes will be made, there will be a new function to create spherical terrains:
TerrainID=BT CreateSphericalTerrain()
And set terrain heightmap will be modified to have a heightmapid parameter. This will set which side of the sphere the heightmap will be applied to.
Quote: "Environment commands - will it be based on 256 colours or 16bit?"
The environment map can be any amount of bits you want, just as long as your pc can handle the image and you dont set up more than 65536 environments!
BlitzTerrain creates an internal array of 16 bit integers with the same dimentions of the image. When you use add terrain environment, BlitzTerrain finds every point on the environment which matches the set colour and inserts is environment map id onto this array at the same spot where it was found. So when you need to find a point environment, this is all it does:
Environment=EnvironmentArray[x][y];
Instead of:
for(i=1;i<EnvironmentCount;i++)
{
if(Image[x][y].Colour==Environment[x][y].Colour)
Environment=i;
}
This method also saves ram because the inputted image could be 32 bit, and it would have to also be stored in a memblock to allow access to its pixel data.
Quote: "With the vertex 'painting' commands in RTTMS, as you say, we just need to alter the base texture/image - but could you create commands to allow someone to pick the correct vertices from the 2d coordinates (of mouse etc) and/or some code snippets on how to paint terrain?"
I'm working on an RTTMS plugin which will be open source. I'll add this feature in.
