Editor update – terrain

Planning and Development

I’m continuing to improve the terrain editing functionality of the scene editor.  Now when you click on a terrain object instead of changing the emissive value so that the terrain glows, a black wireframe is laid over the terrain object itself.  Then, if you press ‘e’ to enter edit mode, the wireframe turns light gray, as in the picture:

This is a better way to do things because it doesn’t mess with the color of the terrain as it is being edited.  When the terrain was glowing a bright green, it made it difficult to see the changes being made.  Now you can tell what you are doing, and the wireframe really helps.  I also change the camera to orthographic.  This just makes it easier to navigate and get a clearer picture of the whole scene.  The white square with line in the image is a directional light helper.

Right now I’m running into a little trouble with saving the scene file.  For simplicity’s sake I was trying to just save the ‘y’ value of every vertex in the terrain.  This isn’t working correctly and I think it’s because of an inherent limitation in the amount of data I can send through an HTTP POST.  I may have to write the scene file data into a pop up <div> then copy and paste that into a scene file on the server.  This isn’t very efficient so I’ll need to improve the process eventually, but it may be an ok solution for now.

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