User Guide - Scape

Giliam de Carpentier
http://www.decarpentier.nl/scape
June 9th, 2012

This document (very) briefly introducesScape’s most important features from a user’s perspective, providing the minimalset of know-how to start experimenting with the Scape terrain editor.

Running the application

Follow the following steps to run Scape. Obviously, only the last step is needed every time. The other steps are needed only once.

The UI Elements

The following image shows the different basic user interface elements

Overview of UI elements

Input

All menu items show their own keyboard shortcuts. True/false values in the Properties pane can be toggled by double clicking on them. Number properties can either be typed in, or dragged to (roughly) the right value by vertically dragging the appropriate up/down widget: Up/Down widget. The exact meaning of all these properties is very tool specific and will not be described in this brief user manual.

The keyboard / mouse mapping used in the 3D View is set through the settings file /Bin/Settings/ButtonDefinitions.xml, making it possible to fully customize the mapping using a text editor. By default, the following mapping is provided:

Navigation

Brushes

Note There's currently no limit to the number of undo levels kept in memory, making it possible to undo every step. The downside of this is that Scape will eventually crash after all available memory has been consumed to store the intermediate heightfield versions. So, for the time being, safe your work often and restart regularly as a precaution.

Lights

Terrain size and scale

Currently, Scape does not allow the user to change the terrain size and scale from within a running instance of application. However, the default parameters can be altered by editing /Bin/Settings/Startup.conf and (re)starting Scape.

Import/export

Note Importing a heightfield image that has a different size than Scape's current size will not affect the Scape's terrain size. Consequently, importing smaller images will only load over only a part of the full terrain, while importing larger images will result in a clipped heightfield.

Note There’s currently no way to create new flat terrains, other than restarting the application, undoing all your previous editing (only in the case you didn’t load a map before), or saving (once) and (re)loading a ‘default’ flat map manually.

The following file formats and per-channel bitdepths are supported for both reading and writing:

File format 8-bit 16-bit 32-bit int 32-bit float
BMP + 1    
PGM + +    
PNG + +    
TGA +      
TIFF + + + +
RAW + +   +

 116-bit U3 BMP: 8-bit BMP using Unreal 3’s convention to encode 16 bits

License

See /Docs/ScapeLicense.txt

Copyright (c) 2007-2012, Giliam de Carpentier. All rights reserved.