Stride Community Terrain Editor by Idomeneas

Stride Community Terrain Editor for terrain creation and manipulation, and Texture blending/manipulation. Includes my Perlin noise functions, extensions to the Heightmap, Texture and Color[] classes and much much more.

Getting Started:

• Download the source and extract somewhere.
• The Stride version used is 4.1. Make sure you open the project in the Stride Studio under that version. Unfortunately, version 4.2 seems to introduce some problems that I wasn't able to solve (or maybe it was just me...). So upgrading to 4.2 might cause issues, in particular with shader automatic compilation (the package Stride.Core.Assets.CompilerApp is not working for me in version 4.2).
• If you have trouble with the project compiling in Visual Studio (VS), clean the solution and rebuild (a few times).
• Make sure you open the project with the Stride editor and Stride version 4.1. If an item gives an error that it is not found, note the location and fix any broken references.
• If all goes well, open the editor either through Stride Game Studio or from VS.
• Note the following:
  • There are default settings for many parameters of the Editor GUI that can be changed in the file .
  • Default camera settings can be changed in the file .
  • Basic Keyboard Navigation help is displayed on the top-left. Can disable at any time from the "Main Menu".
  • Single clicking anywhere in the terrain mesh will move the current terrain point selected (indicated by a red cube) to that point. Only if you have left-shift pressed can you affect the terrain; either its vertices or texture weights.
  • In many places of the GUI you can see a question mark (?). Hover over it to get more info about the GUI item.
  • Single clicking any of the 8 texture images will switch the mode Editor Mode to "Paint Textures".
  • Clicking any "Apply" button will switch automatically to the corresponding mode. For example, clicking the apply button under the Heightmap will switch mode to "Edit Locations".
  • There are several camera modes to try while in game preview mode. Press F8 to switch between them at will...
  • Certain methods are not used, but I left them there so you can see what gives issues. I spent almost two years on and off trying to figure things out, maybe these will save you some time and trouble.

Render Info tab:

Here you will find all sorts of basic options, from camera properties to basic light properties and change their values. Note the switches in the middle. Render Points uses my custom instancing render feature and shader to display a colored cube at all terrain mesh vertices with no hit on FPS.

Randomization tab:

• The values you see here affect all "Generate" type procedures (when you click any generate button).
• You can create some amazing heightmaps if you choose the right values. You have a lot of flexibility to experiment, but for some cases like mountains I've found, I think, the best values and they are set in code by default.
• You can create general images like Clouds, Smoke, Fire, Voronoi tesselations and Biome maps that can be used in many aspects of making a game, e.g., automatic placement of objects at the centers of the Voronoi hulls. Then use these images in the image manipulation tab to create all sorts of beauties...

Messages tab:

Any important messages after some terrain operations can be found here.

World tab:

• You can build a whole world here, with an automated process.
• First make sure you have generated some unique tiles, then load them. After that you can either generate the world map or load it.
• When you click 'Generate with rules', the unique tiles are loaded first (if there are none loaded).
• Any tile in the world is a transformation of a unique tile.
• Observe my stitching approach and linear smoothing. There is probably a fancier way to stitch the different tiles but this approach seems ok and with almost no cost to FPS. Everytime a new tile is within range that has not been generated yet, it is created and stitched on all sides (if a side tile exists). Once a tile has been generated there is no need to recreate it, I just do it the first time only.
• The tiles are loaded asynchronously as you move about the world.
• This part of the editor shows you how you can build a basic Civ type game and a lot of the issues involved.
• Clicking somewhere inside the world map texture will move you to that location (tile) of the world.
• Hold the Right mouse button to move the world map texture gump around your screen.

Terrain tab:

A lot of the magic happens here. Note the following:

• Depending on what you are saving (hitting a "Save" button), an appropriate Filename is chosen and the corresponding file is overwritten. So use Save As button to store the file elsewhere (not in the resource folder).
• All files involved with the current terrain are saved in the Resources/TerrainEditor/ folder. Click the SaveAs buttons to save them elsewhere.
• The "New" button creates a new terrain mesh with the parameters you see on this tab. Weight and Property textures are reset in this case. Max terrain size is 1024x1024 but you can change that to suit your needs if you want.
• There are 3 types of shaders used to display terrain in editor, in game or in tiles mode, chosen via Display Mode: single texture, height based and multi blend.
• The blended texture is important and is utilized when rendering the terrain mesh object in game (under single texture display mode).
• The best looking terrain mode is multi blend. The weights are part of the vertices in this case, and they provide a way to create as beautiful a terrain as your imagination will allow.
• If you dont want to worry about texturing, use the height based shader. Just pick appropriate textures for each of the 10 possible levels.

Area tab:

Please note the following:

• Currently, objects are not instanced. An entity is created for each object in the world. There is a hit on FPS depending on how many are in the frustum, so make sure you set the object visibility distance to what you need.
• Make sure you change the values of the selection ball radius and strength in the terrain tab for finer/detailed weight texture and placement of objects.
• If you open the 'All stride assets loaded' window, you can place any item already created in your stride studio, e.g., any prefabs and models!
• If you open the 'Show all area objects' window, you can manipulate basic properties of a placed object, like location, scale and rotation! You can have other properties like hue, but it was not implemented.
• You can load/save the created objects as an area!
• You can add trees, grass and water planes at will and where ever you want.
• All objects are added at the current center of the selection ball, so if you don't click somewhere in the terrain and just click a place button, they'll go to the (0,0,0) point...

Image Manipulation tab:

A great number of useful image utilities here, enjoy!

Credits:

• The Stride community for all their discussions on discord and their great project contributions. I studied a lot of the existing projects as I was working on the editor. Special thanks and mention to the following members of the community: Simba (@Doprez), alex.mkIII, Nicogo, Kanter, Manio143, Joreyk, Vaso, Tebjan, and Eideren for answering all my questions on discord. Apologies if I forgot anyone!
• Any .cs file gives credit at the top of the file. If I forgot something it was not intentional, just let me know and will add you.
• Some of these projects deserve special mention:
  • Eideren's . It is fully included in the terrain editor and was extended by yours trully to handle images and a message log.
  • johang88's stride terrain projects. Learned a lot from them. In particular, and .
  • Jeske's is utilized in the editor.
  • Tebjan's although not used gave me many ideas on how to setup my cube instancing as needed.
  • Profan's , one of the best projects to start studying stride and its capabilities.
  • Joreyk (IXLLEGACYIXL) and Doprez which helped a lot with showing how to change vertices on the GPU directly! Take care to get this kind of thing right if you change the code I provided or you can mess up your computer display!
  • Tom Groner's shader from is used for water planes.
  • A lot of useful software by Dewald Esterhuizen (www.softwarebydefault.com/) . The filters used in the editor are from this source.