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Terrain brushes

Terrain Material's New... button opens the New Terrain Brush dialog. A brush is a texture-tree entry that does one of three things:

  • Alias - (Paints an existing terrain under a new name, in its own folder.)
  • Re-file - (Moves an existing terrain to another folder. The brush takes the terrain's name.)
  • New texture - (Adds a terrain from a .tga in Art\Terrain, for the editor and the game.)

The dialog previews the whole texture of the picked terrain, or of the first new texture file.

Brush files

New appends each brush to WorldBuilderQt\TerrainBrushes.ini in the game folder. WorldBuilder reads every .ini in WorldBuilderQt\ at startup; the game never reads them. A hand edit takes effect on the next start.

Brush MyRoadPatch          ; alias
  Terrain = AsphaltType1
  Category = Urban\Roads
End

Brush GrassType2           ; re-file
  Category = Grass\Green
End
  • Category - (Folder path in the texture tree, levels split by \ or /. It replaces the Class folder. An alias or new texture without one goes under Custom.)
  • Terrain - (Terrain.ini name the brush paints. Maps store that name, so they load in any build. Left out, the brush re-files the terrain of its own name.)
  • Brush names use letters, digits, _, - and ..

New textures

A new texture also appends a Terrain block to the loose Data\INI\Terrain.ini, so maps painted with it draw in-game.

  • Loose file only - (When Terrain.ini sits only inside a .big, New refuses. Extract it into Data\INI\ first; a new loose copy would hide every terrain in the archive.)
  • Multiplayer - (Terrain INI is part of the multiplayer INI check, so every player needs the edited Terrain.ini.)
  • File - (24- or 32-bit .tga. Each side is cut into 64-pixel tiles, at most 10, so a side over 640 pixels is refused. The name may not contain spaces, ;, = or quotes.)
  • Browse - (Copies a file from outside Art\Terrain into it, replacing those characters with _. A name already in Art\Terrain is skipped, never overwritten.)
  • Several files - (Browse takes many at once. Each becomes its own brush named after its file, all in the chosen category with the same keys. A failure skips that file and is listed; the rest are created.)

Terrain.ini keys

Box Key In-game effect
Blend edges BlendEdges Custom blend-edge texture, listed in Blend Material, not the tree
Restrict construction RestrictConstruction Nothing can be built on it
Glint strength GlintStrength Multiplies GameData's TerrainGlintIntensity; 0 is dull
Glint gloss GlintGloss Glint tightness; unset takes GameData's TerrainGlintGloss
  • New texture - (Ticked boxes are written into its new block.)
  • Existing terrain - (The boxes show its keys as the game parsed them. Blend edges is read-only.)
  • Save to Terrain.ini - (Writes only the keys that changed, into the terrain's last block in the loose Terrain.ini. A terrain defined only in an archive gets an override block of the same name. An unticked key is written as its default, No, 1 or 0, so an earlier block cannot bring an old value back.)
  • Later files - (Save refuses when a file in Data\INI\Terrain\ also defines the terrain, because the game loads it after Terrain.ini. Edit that file instead.)
  • Create with unsaved key edits asks whether to save them too.