Marble Blast Hills

Very very nice!

If I ever get around to using constructor again I'll be sure to use this, or at least get it into the LE.

Very nice. Reminds me a lot of that one MBA level though.. heh.

Looks awsome. But isnt that same technicue that was used in MBA.

Check Philsempire.com Downloads section, MBmapdif is there. Also for converting check out Otto's Map Splitter, it will convert just about anything as long as there are no malformed brushes...

I made something exactly like that about a year ago...

Epic Stuff, shall try them out later, keep up the good work.

Awesome Job!

Nice, are those halved cubes?

Whoa... it's so wavy... feeling seasick... remembers this is land... I'M OKAY!!!

Did they use those similar shapes in MBAdvance?

Wow, that looks great. I end up breaking everything if I try to do something curvy like that in Constructor.

Thanks for all the replies guys!

And with the Map2Dif link given to me(Just forgot the name of Phil's site), I'll be posting the Dif download soon, for all of you to use in your levels.

Few Questions Answered:

1. Unfortunately, this does not blend into flat ground. However, I remember working on such a thing when I first started this. That version did in fact use halved cubes, and therefore did not convert well. I'll get working on that sometime soon, so it may be possible.

2. I did not use halved cubes to make this one, I used simple blocks with their ends pulled to create the wavy hill shape.

3. The method to create this is actually very much related to my curves creation guide, found here: www.marbleblast.com/index.cgi?boa....lay&thread=7329

Basically, you take a curved hill with only a size 1 width, and then make the same one but perpendicular and intersecting the first one. Then just use blocks and pull their edges to match the shape of the curves. I may even consider doing a video tutorial on this, if anyone is interested.

EDIT: Link to dif is up! Check my post with the map.

Very,very nice!

Okay, this a really big bump, but I do want to show you what I've made recently:

The terrain in Constructor:



And some pics of it in-game:









Okay, so one obvious problem with this example is that Marble Blast has some trouble lighting up the faces of parts of the terrain. Though since I made this with large 2x2 squares split into two triangles each and used a grid spacing of 0.1, the terrain itself was a bit rough.

If you want to create smoother-looking terrain, then you'll need to either use smaller squares or set a different grid spacing value (or a mixture of the two). You can also just be more gradual in raising slopes. Just make sure to be careful about having too many brushes in one map, as it will lag in Constructor if you do (there's no problem with splitting it up into different maps).

Whilst I'm planning to use a this method to create some sort of mountainous scenery, the marble does traverse it quite well (albeit differently and preferably with the terrain having a higher friction). Oh, and this terrain converts VERY nicely. I've never received an error from trying to export terrain like this. And it's tile-able, so you can make several of these and string them together, or connect them to flat surfaces.

I am currently working on this to try to make nicer terrain, so stay tuned.

Here's another terrain I made that is less sharp, and also looks better in-game:

Very nice FruBlox!! Keep at it!

Looks great!

Whoa that is sweet

Awesome stuff dude

I remember dropping this idea due to hard way of making it smooth.
This one I made in 5 minutes and it wold take lot more time to smoothen it up.
Size of this is 25x25 tiles (in texture scale of 0.5)




Game would easily hold 50x50 grid of those tho it would take lot of work to make terrain smooth (but it is possible)

Doing terrain in blender is a lot easier (It has sculpting tools similar to terragen that simplify everything) and also smoothing option that smoothens all shadows and terrain a bit but problem i found there was that the more collision DTS has the bigger chance game will crash on low end system.

Edit: Just for little comparison here's old terrain for 1 dead project i did while back. It was supposed to be little test for terrain racetrack type level.

Yeah, I'm aware that modelling programmes can make really good terrain (and man that terrain looks incredibly sweet), but for now I'd like to stick with Constructor alone, and see just what I can do. It's mainly because if I create the terrain in Constructor, it'd be a bit easier to integrate levels into it.

Right now making terrain with Constructor takes some time for to make it look nice and neat, as well as natural. I find that it looks better if you create gradual slopes by changing the elevation of adjacent tiles. That way you can avoid the 'ramp' look of the slopes.

Also, if you just want to create some steep, mountainous scenery, this actually does an okay job.

But like I said, I'll keep working on this and see how far I can get.

Hey RD that's PR's old terrain test!

w00t another update in the attempt to make smooth terrain!










I found that making the initial tiles 1x1 instead of 2x2 and changing the grid scaling to 0.05 instead of 0.1 makes for much smoother terrain. As long as you avoid steep slopes, the lighting will be okay.

Awesomesauce! Keep it up!

Keep the updates coming. Man these things are revolutionary to most level builders around here!

Can't wait to see more of your awesome terrains!

These are awesome people

Really amazing, I always screw the map making terrains. RD's terrain looks sweet, also nice update.

My contribution to this thread.

www.mediafire.com/?ql1bj672nw9uf2u

Also on a related note:

i.imgur.com/eBN5j8h.jpg

Trace pretty much won this thread. Really amazing work on that (i bet it took many hours to make that crazy hill one) and i think its as far as we can go in this direction...

That's an awesome island terrain, does that converts?