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Can anyone tell me if it's possible to have hills and walk over them in FPSC? I tried importing a hilly landscape as an entity and it looks good, but I can walk right through the hills, or if I set it to dynamic, I'm stuck in one spot?

It has been discussed that landscapes are not supported. EA doesn't have it, and I doubt V1 will. I guess you can import them (since thats what you did), but actually having the abilty to walk over them is a practical impossibility.

I think you will be able to once physics has been added, the collisions should be automatic.

Ok thanks. Yeah, I did a search on "terrain" and found my answer. I wonder if I can fake it by putting stairs all around the hills I made, hidden just underneath my terrain model.

bobby

This is perhaps the most restrictive feature of FPSC at the moment and the one which will keep many potential users away from the product.

I cannot imagine for the life of me why TGC would intentionally choose to impose such a restriction? it seems to be incomprehensible.

Hopefully as sugested the inclusion of the physics engine may give users the required ability to walk over a terrain of even a limited nature. If not then the one thing of importance that the inclusion of physics may have given us will be missing - everything else that the physics engine may provide is of no importance by comparision.

I have my doubts and I would be grateful If TGC could officially comment on the future of terrain in FPSC. Is there still any plan for inclusion of a terrain facility?

In the mean time - perhaps forever - if you want anything like a terrain that you can walk over you may have to resort to a workaround like making ground areas with 40 x 40 (160) floor tile segments shaped, rotated and seamlessly joined. Not an easy task.

Anyone want to give it a go? Good luck.

@ uman

When someone like TGC "imposes such a restriction" it is usually because they are focusing on something else. All developers eventually learn that you must focus on one thing at a time, and do it really well, before you move on.

I would rather have a small set of useful and reliable features, than see them add dozens of buggy ones.

I don't think that this "restriction" was intentional at all. Based on how the scripting works and how the segments and entities are just automatically handled by the engine, I think they would have to write a whole new set of code to handle terrain.

And if they're busy doing something like adding multiplayer-online features to v1, then I would rather let them finish what they're doing.

Also... On the subject of segmented landscapes.
If you modeled a terrain at full size in your modeler, and then used a cut tool to divide it into 160 pieces, then you could export them separately, in place, and they would all be rotated and placed correctly when you pulled them into the segment editor. Pull in all the pieces and don't move them an inch (unless you have to lower them to zero on the y axis). Then save it all as a single segment. (I think this would be easier than making it a prefab, but I'm not sure).

I might just try this myself.

hai_ok,

very well said,

I would agree with your comments.

Of course the EA version already has many unstable and buggy features which one would hope would receive a fix by V1, nevermind anything additional, which may add to that list, whilst extending FPSC capabilties.

I have tried using a single large terrain (.x file) as a segment, which did not work though splitting a large terrain into tiles which would require 160 pieces for a full level terrain, would certainly make terrain creation flexible I am not sure if it would work - it may do so.

In theory it sounds like it may work though you may have to make and place each terrain tile - 160 of them as individual floor segments - thats a lot. Even then I dont think it will work as floor segments differ from a traditional terrain (piece). Floor segments are composed of flattened cubes effectively while a terrain is a one sided (face)polygonal structure. Much different.

There are methods to generate a BSP landscape or other format enclosed terrain sections and have them composed of pieces giving a result of multi faced and enclosed pieces. These can be converted to .x files via various routes and may be an optional idea. Basically each piece would look something like one of the roof segments in FPSC. That might work but is a considerable undertaking overall.

Unfortuneatly I am not aware of any hard coded restrictions there may be in place preventing this, so it may be a great deal of hard work attempting this for no end result.

Maybe TGC could actually say if it might be possible or prevented by the engine hard coding? I have heard nothing from TGC re: terrains other than they cannot be walked over. Nothing too suggest that trying to overcome that may be possible by any method.

I will certainly give it a go sometime though I already have other stability problems to overcome first.