In the field editor, you may have noticed that when it comes time to generate your little world o' awesome, there seems to be this annoying red box that defines the area your character can walk around in. (Basically, the level boundary). As I have -as of yet- been unable to track down the option to turn the blasted thing off, I decided to accept it for what it is and learn its' ways.

So far, I have found this out. The Level Bounding box is a perfect square that is defined by the following (x,y) coordinates:
(18,18) , (18, 120) , (120, 18) , (120, 120)

and that water will show through land if the land is not higher than 45 on the z coordinate. (you'll know you're getting close; the game generates a "beach" on any land shorter than 48 on the z coordinate. This is of course for water on the "low" setting.

You can see the boundaries by pressing the square button in vertical mode (I think it's the square; well, it's one of those buttons anyway). All unwalkable terrain is highlighted in glowing red. If you switch to graphics mode with this turned on, it'll carry over and you can see all the unwalkable terrain while designing your graphics.

Use the terrain beyond the boundaries to make your fantasy world look rich and complete. Place mountains, rivers, forested hills, to make it look like there's more terrain beyond the boundaries.

If the boundaries weren't there, you could walk right up to the edge of the field and then all you would see is the background right in front of your face. That wouldn't be good.

Well, yes, but I'd at least like to make the area bigger. I feel as if the designers could have engineered that boundary into the field editor as a matter of course, where the boundary was defined by the actual size of the editor window. I made a map, but I've had to trim so much off the edges that it looks a bit square-ish. And I happen to find it mildly annoying that I have land I cannot walk on but I can see. Like right in front of me.
I'm all like "oh hey that's an interesting feature! *walks over there*
*BAM* HEY! Why did I stop!? "
I just always saw that as poor level design.

Anyway, If you also press start it layers the graphical info under the elevation info. (if you are in V-mode)
If you are in G-mode, it does the opposite. (elevation under graphics) Along with the Square button, I've found that I can real make my maps look well polished, and geographically believable.

I wish it would highlight land above water that's unwalkable. Trying to test whether a cliff acted as a cliff was annoying. You shouldn't be able to walk up hills that steep in the first place.

I think the level design is as good as you make it.

I've designed some bad-assed looking fields for my games. Never had any complaints about the unwalkable boundary. In "Raiders" we're just exploring a small region of a large world. Because of the story's focus, there's no reason to go gallivanting about exploring foreign lands that have nothing to do with what's going on. The boundaries alllow me to include a lot of extraneous terrain that makes it look like the land continues off into the horizon (as opposed to having the region we're supposed to explore just stop at the edges with nothing to see at the edges). The boundaries also keep the player focused in the region we're supposed to be exploring, instead of possibly wandering off into some extraneous forested region and getting lost.

The region we're exploring is not square-shaped. The entire west side of the region has coast lines that meander from north to mid-south, and the southwest area of the field is an offshore peninsula that's just there for looks (you can't get there while playing the game). Pretty much all of the unwalkable terrain beyond the borders helps the world to look good.

My current project has three contiguous fields that form a continent. Again, it ain't square-shaped, and none of the individual regions are square-shaped either. There are coast lines that meander, bays, and rivers that flow out into the ocean. I place offshore islands in some of the corners, so that when you're at a tall mountain peak looking out, the islands somewhat cover up the fact that the field is in fact a square (it's nicer to see something out there than just the edges of the water meeting at a sharp angle).

The extraneous terrain beyond the boundaries gives us the impression that there's more to see in that direction; and indeed, there is. You'll see a road extending north, and when you get to the north edge of the map, an event asks if you want to travel north to another region. Say yes, and you're transported to the adjacent field, where you can see terrain extending southward that looks contiguous with the field you just left.



Agreed! Wholeheartedly! I find the steepest walkable incline to be way too steep for my liking, and it puts a a bit of a damper on my mountain designing efforts. I have to constantly test my mountain pathways to make sure you can't go up or down at a place where I don't want you to. Then when it turns out that you can go up or down, I have to adjust the whole thing's height to compensate.

I think the type of stuff I enjoy doing with terrain is stuff the designers never intended for us to do (especially because the area-affect tool can't be shrunk to a single square in size).

My issue with that (and kudos for you for having the patience to pull it off) is the fact that there is no "Copy area" option either. If there was one then setting up areas like what you describe would be a snap. Just copy a selection that defines the edge of your map, and copy and paste it onto the corresponding area of your new map.
After all, making sure that all of the terrain types are exactly the same is tedious enough with out having to worry about making sure that the elevation info is exactly the same as well.

For my game, I have 3 fields so far. I'm using two as "world maps" and the other one is actually an area that you can explore and fight enemies. (No random encounters on the world maps by the way, getting the enemy types to be properly powerful in the right spots is, as far as I can see, impossible, or very, very hard.)
This gives the effect that they are actually continents on a bigger world, and the only thing that changes is the scale.

I have noticed that the game does s-o-r-t--o-f have a visible horizon, and while the squarish water is a bit... odd, I don't see it as a video game rarity. Mind you this is with a cheat code, but if you activate moonjump in Tony Hawk's Underground 1, there are many MANY occasions where you can actually go over the level boundaries by jumping at a wall and continuously pressing up and ollie-ing. In such instances, you can see that the folks at neversoft modeled their water in much the same way. It seems mildly believable that you simply can't see under the water any more (for what ever reason) at that distance.

As for the issues with slopes, I find that as long as there is at least a 6 to 8 point difference in elevation between adjacent coordinates on the field, you will generate a slope too steep to scale.

It's also important to use the elevation cross sections along the edges of the current zone. They provide a good meter of walk-ability. Also the colors help, but can be hard to see when you are editing with the layering effect on. And by that I mean how sharply they contrast.
I would have liked there to be a color gradient, or lines of elevation to show more clearly how the land forms would look when rendered, but we dont have tthose either.

Getting the graphics contiguous was easy. I just had a look at Field A and remembered the x coordinate for where the forest ends and grass begins and such, then went over to Field B and installed it there. Then back to Field A to look at some more graphical features at the north end of the field, and so on. The elevation... it's more like an approximation. The elevations at the exact north end of Field A don't really matter as far as perfectly matching up with the elevations at the exact south end of Field B because I tend to place hills and forested regions that obscure your view. While playing the game, you can't see the exact north end of the field, either because there's a hill beyond the unwalkable boundary or because myriad trees obscure your view. You'll see a road extending north through forest or a road going up a hill. Of course, Field B has the same features at its south end, so it looks like you traveled north over a hill or through dense forest to get to the second field. The transport event has some footstep sound effects to give the impression that the character is continuing to walk beyond the boundary.

So yeah, they look contiguous (most important feature) but you never get to walk on the terrain that's beyond the invisible barrier.




I never thought of changing up the scale. Hopefully this will be obvious to the player.

But I understand what you're getting at. Fields tend to be on a different scale from towns and dungeons. Even though the character looks the same size, town and dungeon objects are shrunk to a manageable size on the field. If a town was on the same scale on the field, you'd have to walk quite a distance just to get around it. Same goes for castles and other objects.

Man, all this talk about fields is making me want to design some more kick-ass scenery to explore. Gotta finish the current project first.

Yes I get that. I was simply pointing out that it would have been a useful feature to have and that what you describe is a rather tedious task what with all the switching back and forth between fields. With a copy area selection tool, we could have skipped all of that and just plunked down the proper land forms and continued on from there.

to answer you question, yes, it will be obvious to the player. the field is called "Stone Plains" and I am using three "big rocks" to define a small ring. When you walk up to one of the rocks it asks you if you would like to enter stone plains. (I set up a yes/no tree here.)

The actual field is a bit like a large gorge or open basin, with highlands scattered about. It needs more editing, but eventualy, I will have "rocks" that are embedded in the ground, and some decorative trees scattered around. The idea is to get the forms on the world map to be a rough model of what the actual area looks like, much as how "towns" only seem to have one hut in them, but when you go inside, there are many houses and people.

That's pretty cool! Inventing your own town/dungeon graphic on a field, but it's for another field. Nice!