It really changes the looks of a planet... But I had to remove all deco because there is nothing I can do to exclude trees from the roads. I may have found a solution/ trick by restricting trees/ decos to a "range" of slopes, and roads to another one. That makes design a bit more complicated.
It needs a spiked cattle-catcher As is is there it looks more I-76 than Mad Max. Not that that is a bad thing.
i thought about a death race a long time ago. I would just limit it to fixed guns since it is pretty much way to fast when using turrets. You'll have the one that turns up with a HV that has an arty turret. ;-) Also you would probably need to work with tradeoffs: limit the number of thrusters and RCS while leaving armor free. Than you have the choice to build either a quick and nimble HV or a heavy well armored but slow HV. And with the restriction of only one fixed minigun it might take a while to have the last man standing.
I'd like to show my progress with Achilles. These are exterior shots during handling abs weapons testing. The hull is currently airtight. two of the rocket launchers need to be relocated. The 'ramp bottom A' blocks that cover the side-mount pulse lasers with their phantom cubes. it was so much nicer when you fire thru partial blocks. Anyway: Had to do a little touch-up. I still missed a spot. (and the whole other side). i keep forgetting to put my tools away.
If you were to go through and remove the trees and whatever else may be in the road (could leave a rock or boulder or two*evil grin*) by hand would they just respawn in the same place or would it remove them permanently? Time consuming, yes, but perhaps easier? Inquiring minds want to know.
When a player removes stuff in game it is removed forever, apart some POIs and ore nodes (if regen=true). The problem is when the playfield is "generated" at the beginning of a new game, the deco items (trees, bushes, rocks, plants) are placed everywhere in a biome, regardless of textures. What defines the placement of these deco items are "slope" and altitude, for example "open plains" biome contains specific trees, plants and rocks, and lies between altitudes X and Y, and all decos can spawn if slope of the ground is between 0 and 10 degrees. So if a road is flat it is the perfect ground to spaw deco items. So it may be possible to restrict deco items on a set altitude to spawn on slopes between 5 and 10 degrees, and it will leave the road free as long as it is between 0 and 5 degree slope. If I make the ground generally rough with lots of bumps, and make the roads real smooth, I can then "force" items to spawn exclusively on "rough ground" because there are small slopes on every bump. The contrary happened when I first tried to make custom maps, where the ground was too rough and no deco spawned at all, anywhere, although there were large flat areas. Flatness was on a "large scale" but on a small scale there were bumps on almost every voxel of the terrain surface. Just smoothing the ground made all deco appear. I could also make the road just 2 meters lower / higher than the flat ground around where the biome's altitude is set. If I want to make a long stretch of road climbing a hill I will have to make the biome's deco items spawn on smaller slopes than the road. I will try a mix of these tricks to get my roads free of deco. Edit : one very positive aspect about the way the game "randomly" places items on the terrain is that since most roads logically go on flat grounds (fields, valleys) that is also where most of the POIs are placed. So by making at least one road in the plains between each big mountain, and having one or two climbing to reach a plateau, all POIs have a road nearby. This makes the whole terrain seem more "logical" since roads all lead somewhere interesting, or seem to link these places together.
I was afraid you were going to say that. I can see your approach is pretty much the only choice. I'm confident you'll succeed. Thanks so much for the info. It will be most useful when I can start on the projects I have in mind. Finally, a way to make roads that don't look like crap or suck up a boatload of blocks. Yay! \o/
