CAW - Part 2

PATIENCE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND

The world in the making has clearly taken alot longer than anticipated. Its been 4 - 5 months? It takes quite a fair bit of patience. I guess I "missed" reading the memo about distant terrain & now am stuck with carving out the landscape at the border.

So whats distant terrain? It is an object that needs to be placed in CAW when the world is still in its infancy. The reason for this is to make sure the height map or edges matches with the distant terrain object.

To further illustrate. Screenshot above shows the edges of the map itself. The mountain cuts off abruptly from this point. Distant Terrain objects are required to grant the illusion that it goes on forever seamlessly.

Since, I "conveniently" forgot about this step. I will have to reserve two chunks of map off the edges and manually sculpt them to hide the sea. A way to do this is to surround all edges as tall impassable mountains. Then seal it off by painting the edges with non-routing / non camera brushes. This prevents sims to go there and also prevents players from moving in-game cameras to that area.

A lighthouse. Mountain ranges in the background, which are all manually raised to this height then carved out into steep hills and valleys.

The other method is to just have coastal areas on all 4 sides of the edge.

The first method is tremendously time-consuming. The 2nd method... not quite so, which probably explains why 90% of the user created worlds are islands in the middle of the ocean.

Lighthouse can be seen again. Viewed from the other side of the map. The sea disappears off into the horizon. Looks natural. This will take only 1/100th of the time you will spend on sculpting border mountain ranges.