I have a problem. I have loaded my gpx file and the terrain loads fine and also the route. Creating the bodies of water is the problem though. After finding out that creating smaller bodies at a time eliminates massive chasms occuring with no water, I have tried doing that. Works good but the problem is that the big lake I am trying to fill in has 4 smaller sections to it so far all of varying heights. The individual points are all on the same level so it shouldn't be a problem but if you zoom down and look at them as a cross-section you can see they are staggered. Any help to solve this would be appreciated.
What I would try first in your place is to make the whole lake at once and export it to see how it looks in game. This will often be different from what it looks like in the stage editor. If you see the big parts of the lake without water in game too, I can tell you how to get rid of them or adjust the altitude of the individual smaller lakes.
After 2 days of the game not working at all, I finally fixed that problem and tested the bare basic of a stage I started working on. Still not showing up in game as shown here:
As you can see the water seems to just stop. Also the level is low and it has has done weird things with the land on the water's edge. It is meant to be a almost the same level as the water. See here for example:
Any assistance would be appreciated. I have included the zcts file which only has the road, water and route.
ok, let's see.
What you want is just one single lake, otherwise it is almost impossible to get a somewhat nice looking result. First some general things to keep in mind.
- Use less of the spline points. That is probably what caused the issue in the last picture.
- You want to have the spline points in roughly equal altitude. Therefore it is good to first use some flattening before creating a lake. The level of the water will be at the height of the lowest point on the spline. If they are at various heights, near the high ones you will get massive cliffs, like in the first picture.
Now for what you should do here (if you have version without lakes, use that one and skip points 1 and 2)
1. Delete all the big lakes you have there (use CTRL+T).
2. Use flatten function to resolve these issues, ideally flattening the whole part you want to put lake in to one height:
3. Untick "Snap objects to landscape":
4. Trace one big lake. Keep the spline points slightly off the shore and somewhat apart from each other (otoh, you don't want too few points, it is easier to delete some rather than to add some later). Keep checking if the altitude for the points you are adding is not too far off the ones you already have. You can see the altitude here on the right:
If it happens that one is more than about 10 meters off the others, manually adjust the height (the blue arrow pointing up) or delete it, flatten the landscape and place it again.
In the end the lake should look like this, covering almost the whole part you want to cover without intersecting itself:
5. Use "Terrain rise" function to lower the part of landscape in between the two ends of your lake joining together to get something like this:
6. Adjust level and depth for your lake. In this case I used 0.2 and 2, but see what works best for you.
7. If you feel like it is needed adjust the position of the spline points (with "Snap objects to landscape" still unticked) so that they lie closer to where the actual shoreline is. Also you can you the landscape functions to make the coast look better in some places if needed.
That should be it. If you have further questions about the process, don't hesitate to ask.
And of course, you can change the look of the lake in the end by adjusting name, shoreline and other parameters. If the lake is too big and it takes a long time for these changes to appear, you might want to consider deleting the last spline point, which completed the lake (thus making the lake disappear, so that changes in the graphical parameters won't be applied until you complete the spline) and then adjust the parameters. After you are happy with the options, complete the lake again.
