Since you have to hand place the cliffs regardless does it really matter? It's up to you. Do you want to tweak the generated textures, or do you want to hand place the textures?

The issue I always see when people hand place them, is they just to large swatches of the same texture and it looks terrible. If you generate it mixes it up really well, then you can tweak it to fit the world more specifically and you get a better result. So don't generate if you can mix it up well enough on your own, I guess?

Well, I will handplace the textures aswell. I rly dont like the texture generation, regarding the "grass in cliff" thing.

Well, perhaps someone is interested in it: This is wat i came up with, after finetuning the reg. editor for nearly 3 hours.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=108795712
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=108795629

Not bad, but it still looks rather generic and generated, which is why you'll definitely want to touch it all up by hand.

Nope, trees are rotatable. The region generator can actually do incredible things, if you work at it. Noirdesir and Lumpypat are two of the greatest when it comes to this. The region generator gets a lot of unwarranted flack. People think it can only generate ugly, artificial landscapes. This is not true, even though hand editing obviously gives things a much higher level of fine detail. Look at these images: http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/20/19696/2012-05-26_00009.jpg http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/20/19696/2012-05-26_00011.jpg http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/20/19696/ScreenShot27.jpg and these from Oblivion: http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/13/12445/003.3.jpg http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/13/12445/001fq.1.jpg http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/13/12445/001.3.jpg . Do those look unnatural? If I sound like I am ranting a bit...well i probably am . The region generator getting constantly bashed is a bit of a pet peev of mine .

Edit: and to clarify, I am not saying hand editing is bad. I fully understand that it is a good thing. I was a hand detailing landscaper myself on MERP. But I also came to have respect for the region generator when it is in the right hands

While those certainly aren't ugly, they definitely look generic... I think a common misconception on the other side, is that any landscape where things aren't floating/symettrical looks good... Those places look 'beautiful' but they don't look unique. If you stuck me in a random part of that forest, then blindfolded me and took me to another random part, how do I know you didn't just walk me ten feet and spin me around a few times? That kind of thing. Now I'm not trying to insult those lands or anything, I just think people tend to pass things as 'good' in exteriors too easily sometimes and it really does take a lot of work to legitimately make a unique exterior experience.

Understandable to an extent. However, it all depends on scale. When you start getting to the scale MERP was at, what you call "generic" is actually a good thing to have. Once you are dealing with that much space, having a "unique" thing or different "feel" every two feet is not a good thing and actually backfires: the whole world feels blatantly fake and put on. Go outside and wonder a forest and this x square feet of land won't look terribly different from the next patch. A fallen log here, and few things here and there, etc. Region generation is excellent at creating "wilderness" areas, vast expanses, where you can use it as a canvas to create detailed areas of interest. That is the best way to look at it: a painting. Look at any great painting and not all areas are of the same level of detail. Those "generic" areas are no less important than the other areas of the painting. Detail overload actually makes for a bad piece in most cases. Balance is needed.

Stupid edit bugs *snip*

True, that's certainly one way of looking at it. I'm just not sure what I think about that in terms of game design. (Be it good or bad) Some people prefer large expanses between dungeons (Many complained that Skyrim was too compact and there was a dungeon every ten feet), whereas some people would rather not pointlessly run through large portions of random wilderness to get places. It certainly is a balance.

Well like I said, it has a lot to do with scale. Skyrim is relatively compact and is a populated country. So the idea that there's lots of stuff around is not so absurd. But when you have a continent with both countries and wilderness that is in excess of 8x the Skyrim land area, having stuff every twenty feet or so starts to feel kinda unusual. Rather, it is better at those sizes to have more space so that uniqueness in and of itself doesn't become too common place. Once you reach those sizes, you don't want to have so many special things that finding special things no longer feels like an accomplishment. It is almost a numbers thing, where you get to the point where it's just like "oh look, a cave. Haven't seen one of THOSE in a while." It is basically the idea of scaling. We recognize all game worlds are scaled down, each to a different level. Skyrim is obviously scaled down considerably, so we more readily accept that stuff is close together. However, if everything was really close together in a world that is obviously less scaled down (and therefore considerably larger), we would recognize that something is amiss. Going back to the painting illustration, shrinking a painting the size of a wall down to a piece of notebook paper naturally causes everything to be close toghether. However, proportions are maintained and it looks fine. The same idea applies in a way.

And of course there is the feel of the world to think about. Having too much too close together almost makes it shrink in a way. If you have a massive area that you want to feel vast, it is good to spread things out a bit. The balancing act comes from the space provided becoming to boring. You want people to feel like they are traveling through a vast land, but you don't want the "boring stretch of highway" effect where it becomes absurdly dull. This can be compensated by many things: proper region gen creates good ambiance, hand placed things from time to time break up monotony, and npcs of various sorts (enemies, travelers, wanderers, bandits, etc etc) can provide ample distraction. All this links to the world you are trying to create, how you want it to feel. Is it a heavily populated land? A wilderness frontier? And so on.

The point I was making is that the region generator can supply an excellent canvas, a sort of "primal wilderness" you can build the rest on to. It creates the basic, bare landscape in a natural way that supplies an excellent amount of macro detail. This allows hand detailing to focus on the task of deciding where and how much micro detail should be placed. Of course, a related topic to this is also the quality of the heightmap, which can make or break the ambiance just as much as any landscape, generated or otherwise.

I am not denying the importance of hand detailing, merely trying to show that region generation has definite value and can create good basic landscapes to build on.

I will oc handtouch it, but I dont get it why you say it looks generic. I mean....it is a big forest, there wont/can't be highlights on every corner. Plz point out what botheres you about the screenshots It is right what you said: Get blindfolded, get moved around (not to a special place) and you will think you have not been moved to far. But in a real forest you wont feel any different, when you go hiking. There will be parts where you will say: Wow look around this looks special. But 90 % are not special, just wood ^^. But I will definately add special places to break things up.
Like waterfalls(http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=108856532), mammothtrees, shrines, caves, some glades with special monsters in it, or other evenets, and so on.


I think it is also a question of you game design, when you add large areas with nothing special. The player should feel somewhere in the middle, not being able to fast travel into savety immediately. But there should be also ways to bypass such fast areas, so one does NOT have to walk through them again and again and again. Be it special travel services, teleportal skills/anchor stones, special magic abilities, whatver you can think of.

Yeah it is largely opinion on game design. To me, I donno, the way the region generator spits out lands, it just feels... 'lame'. Trees and bushes randomly thrown about. As random as nature is, things actually usually grow in a certain way. You'll notice Skyrim has clumps of denser trees, forests, clearing, open fields, etc. With the region generator you get a perfectly even forest, where every single part is exactly the same density and spread.

Of course adding random little things like waterfalls (That looks great, by the way!) helps. But the even/randomness of it actually looks... unnatural. The region generator simply cannot generate the clumped randomness of a wilderness, which is why I personally think it needs to be touched up. Group things, seperate things, make it uneven. Because if I walked through a forest that was the exact same desity throughout (Except for the special things/dungeons/etc) it would be very bland and no fun to play in. However making it more 'natural' even without specifically adding 'landmarks' makes it more entertaining, interesting, and memorable, improving the player's experience.

Ah now i know what you are talking about. In this point you are right, but this is somehow what at least I was mentioning, that you have to break this "symmetrie" up by hand. Just generate a land and that's it, that should not be the way to design the final landscape.

Having worked with noir, I can say that there are techniques for avoiding that unnatural spread you speak of. But he would be better for talking about it as he is the generation mastermind, not me.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts exactly. For me, I would rather create it from scratch rather than have to mold what the region generator spits out. Of course, a lot of people find it easier or better to generate then edit, but I prefer to simply work with it from the beginning.

Another good use of using the region generator is for roads and paths. I originally textured my worldspace with all the base textures, but found it difficult to use the natural terrain for roads and paths

I decided to do a colour coded terrain first and apply a red texture to all areas that are less than 30 degrees. That's a 1:3 slope. I then painted the roads in a yellow texture. This let me see where the landscpe was going to need sculpted, to join the red areas together, especially in the mountain areas.

In hindsite, I should have split this up into green for 1 to 15 degrees for the main roads and then done the red for 16 to 30 degrees, but I only though of that once I had started, so I just continued.

You can see the results here -
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tambos.turf/Skyrim/TerrainColors.jpg

This didn't take long to generate, but it's a big help when trying to make a path/road up and down the mountainside.
Once all the paths/roads are made, I'll just delete that region and put the original back, to add the base textures. Then it's just a case of going through and altering things by hand.

I should add that this is a 128x128 world.

That's actually a really cool use of the region generator.