Making Caves with TGEA terrain

#1 You can not cut holes in Atlas, only into Legacy Terrains.

#2 Your only option right now is to fake the entrance. Create the entrance to the cave in such a way that the player cant see the atlas terrain inside of the cave (maybe have a curved cave entrance) and then afew steps into this fake cave entrance you teleport the player to another location that has the actual cave (more then likely just right below the atlas terrain or you could put it anywhere.

You do lose the ability to look outside of the cave and vica versa but its currently the only way to do it. As removing a section of the atlas terrain is not a easy task.

#3 Thanks for the advice. I didn't want to do it that way but I guess I have no option unless I gain C++ skills by downloading it into my head like The Matrix.

#4 I thought you could have multiple Atlas terrains?

If yes, use the 'ground' terrain as the floor of the cave, and put another terrain over the top as the 'ceiling' of the cave, round the TOP terrains edges to meet the edges of ground terrain to form tunnels. You can put terrain 'spikes' in to serve as Stalactites and Stalagmites. And creative terrain textures (as cave textures now..) will make it look very convincing.
If no, still use the ground terrain as the floor of the cave, but use static mesh OVER the cave to form the ceiling, block it off from the 'outside' world by more static mesh that look like mountains or cliffs....

#5 We was asking about how to cut a hole in atlas.. And its something that is not possible at this time. Not without alot of work anyways.

Also createing roundedis terrain is alot easier said then done with atlas. You would have alot better luck and better looking just modeling it out in Constructor or a 3d modeling program.

#6 I am curious on how I would go about making a cave in TGEA since it uses the Atlas map...?

Man, it gets tiresome when i need to defend my forum reply because other people dont comprehend someone's question fully. Its understandable that he asks about cutting a terrain hole as in TGE, but that have been stated NOT POSSIBLE. Thomas Oliver, then suggest one method of achieving a decent cave result, (and by same logic should you not reply to YOUR post in the same way you reply to my post?) As far as working with Atlas terrains, i have no clue as i have not done it before, but i did propose a great method of building caves that DO work in many other rendering engines i have build games with...

Also Thomas Oliver's idea is the most easy to get working, as always in computer game level design it is a fine art of deceiving the player visually to achieve results the game engine may not naturally support.

#7 As atlas terrains don't render from bottom, no multiple atlas won't help. Turning them: try it, so far I got bad glitches at the chunk seams whenever I dared to touch the scaling value and set it to something different then 1,1,1

#8 Ah that kinda sux. TGEA is seeming less and less ADVANCED the more i learn about it.....

#9 Hm, TGE(A) hasn't enough features that users want. But its price is very good, which means that good coders have access to that kind of technology and they will achieve their aims doing modifications to the SDK building the features they desire. Nothing is impossible. Marc said it is not possible to make holes in Atlas terrain. I guess he is right. I haven't worked with atlas though. But i recomend using Legasy terrain and do the whole. After that build your cave using brushes,export it to DIF and mask the entance using your modeling techniques. This will do the job.
I see many people like using atlas terrains more than legasy terrains. Anyway if you want your game to look unique and interesting the levels must be 90% hand made geometry. The terrain must be used almost nowhere. This is my opinion about building levels. I know that this means a lot of work but... :). So come to think of it there is no too much sence using atlas instead of legasy.

#10 Thank you everyone for your direction on this issue, it is appreciated.

Caylo -- thankyou for the cool pic; I have been all over youtube (obviously the wrong places) looking for a good inspiration.

Anyway I thought of making the ground the base of the cave -- I might go this route if I can not get constructer to work properly. I love the program layout but it never renders a complete DIF for me even when turning the lighting down, making everything detail brushes, turning off the HSR and other render passes etc.

My cave is several miles long (based on an old board game that me and my friends played) and so I had to split it up into seperate missions using a mission-trigger. I can load the original mission with different terrains, no terrain, multiple terrains, BUT the mission that I load after (triggered) will not support anything but what the original mission has. I thought the missions were seperate entities, but evidently not.

I don't have my website up yet otherwise I would post some pics of what I mean.

#11 I was trying to figure our something similar. here's a way I think you can "fake" the whole in the terrain...
make a giant crater using the outside terrain. then, use solid geometry to make the inside of the cave and put it in the crater, so the crater will act as the floor of the cave. then, make a second terrain to cover the whole thing up, leave only the entrance of the cave uncovered (obviously the edge of the terrain since holes aren't possible.

#12 That sounds like it would work wih MegaTerrains - which you *can* cut holes in. It's just the huge Atlas terrain that doesn't allow holes. Also, Bill Vee released a resource that allows you to fake cutting holes in Atlas terrains by using some shader trickery. That might be the easiest solution.