openBVE Discussion Board

One of the hardest things in BVE is to achieve smooth and realistic hills, mountains. Is there any chance to apply such feature in future openBVE? I am thinking about mountains like in Trainz, RS...

If there was similar topic, please delete this and redirect me. Thank you!

I'm pretty sure that mountains and hills can be made visual in Open BVE. Please remember that BVE is a simulator which makes a view of the landscape for you as a driver, not a made-up landscape through which you would drive, like MSTS f.i. So it is not the mountains and hills itself, but what you see of it from you viewpoint.

OK, it can be made just like in BVE, but BVE doesn't have animated objects and external views? By that, openBVE is close to MSTS and RS and others, so why there would not be similar terrain configuration? OpenBVE is not exclusively cab-view like BVE is...

No reason why hills and mountains cannot be made but the restricted viewing distance and consequent appearance of being built before your eyes is a problem.

Perhaps an option to display ground objects only with a greater drawing distance would help.

The other simulators have terrain editors built into them and all you need to do is to raise or lower the ground by using your mouse. These mountains can contain thousands of polygons. Most BVE route editors seem to still use handcoding and it would take a very long time to create mountains this way. The best solution is to use a 3D editor or terrain builder to create parts of the landscape and to export it in a format that could be used by OpenBVE. They could then be dropped into a route as free objects.

tinhare wrote:The other simulators have terrain editors built into them and all you need to do is to raise or lower the ground by using your mouse.

That's right, don't you think that it would be nice to have such feature in openBVE?

In BVE we had Easy Hill, but the developer stopped working on it. I think 1.0 ver was better than 1.1 but you still had to do many things manually.


Method shown here is the same as mountains solution in Joetsu Border Line.

In this matter BVE solution is not the best one, so I think terrain editors would be great achievement for openBVE.

VICTOR wrote:... so I think terrain editors would be great achievement for openBVE.

But seems editors are not planned...

VICTOR wrote:In BVE we had Easy Hill, but the developer stopped working on it.

Can you not just continue to use the last version of Easy Hill that was originally released? The file formats are the same afterall!

Of course, if more people allowed their source code to be shared and improved, you wouldn't have the problem of a single developer getting bored and the whole project up until that time being wasted!...

sladen wrote:Can you not just continue to use the last version of Easy Hill that was originally released? The file formats are the same afterall!

Well, try it for yourself. Many developers tried to use that tool - but there seems to be a bug. Some views simply don't work.

http://blitz3d.pnz.ru/easytool/page_e.php?cont=hill_e

If you can get third screenshot, hats off to you