Thanks Glenn - Im at work now so will have to try it when I get home - I dont have any trouble creating the heightmap or the alphamap just getting it to show up as something other than a flat board in gensurf - I will try to change the grid size and to set the map color settings different from what I have been setting them at -

Thanks for the advice and your time.

Shoot...Out

Well it took me quite a few attempts and I finally did get the tut for terrain to work for me. It's not an easy task I might add. :ohwell:

Ok im back. The tutorial should be enough for you to do this but in case you still don't get it...
1. Copy and paste your heightmap into a 32x32 .png in black and white also.
............. the reason for this is so that you know where your hills and valleys are for when you decide the textures
2. Save this into texturesyourtexturesANYNAME.png
...........unlike the heightmap, you must have it in the SOF directory
2. choose the metashader that suites your needs. Lets pretend im using a kam terrain so i Would enter the key/value shader metashader/kam4
AND LINK IT TO YOUR ALPHAMAP (key/value) alphamap textures/mytextures/myalphamapname.
3. Now to edit the texturing job, open your 32x32 in a picture program. Note that each color will represent a texture in the game. Open the metashader.shader in your sdkbaseshaders and you will see a bunch of subtitled shaders. Those are ones you pick from. If there are 4 textures, you will take 256 and divide it by 4. You will get 0, 64, 128, and 255. (colors are from 0-255). The 0 (black) represents the first texture on the list. 64 (dark grey) represents hte second texture on the list, and so on until you reach 255. If there are two textures you would use 0 and 255. So basically you color the texture where you want it and the game will put nice transitions between them for you.
4. If you use a alphamap, make sure the top surfice of your terrain is made of tools/_terrain, else it will not work.
5. Save and compile, should work just fine.

i dont know why you all hate my tutorial !!? if you can say what i can do to fix it i can maybe lol

p.s. glenn i dont recommend the remapping of vertex colors, from the tut -- note: remapping the color values will affect terrain size but may cause errors, leave them at 0 and 255 there is a better way to do it.

Not at all Narc - The tutorial was great - not sure why I couldn't get it to work the way I wanted it too. I did however finally manage the terrain to work - I did have luck using both the plugin and standalone Gensurf to create it. The only thing I did different was to set the mapping color 255 to a new height - where the color 0 was height 0 and the color 255 was 1024 or 768 (the 2 that I tried).

Thanks again for the tutorial Narc and Glenn thanks for your post also.

Shoot...Out