Mega cliff deformation

The picture's not exactly the best in the world, but I think it says what needs to be said :)

My apologies if this isn't a new idea.
And many, many thanks to zephir's tutorial for showing me how to alter height to create this effect. I'm still working out the kinks to this, but hopefully, I'll be able to post something a little cooler looking in the near future.

PS - also discovered through screwing around with the w3e format: the maximum cliff step is defnitely hard coded at 2 (cliff is limited to only 5 possible values, reflecting -2, -1, flat, +1, and +2)

Hmmm, along the same lines, I just noticed that you can set water height independent of terrain height. The blue in the front is a "water spire." The terrain is flat there, but the water flows in that one area. In the foreground, is a lower hill with a lower water spire on top of it. Just confirmed, btw, that these spires are walkable when they would otherwise be passable. As far as I can tell, this isn't different from what you do in WE, but by playing with the values themselves, you can make things much steeper than you can inside WE.

The only problem is that this is *really* cumbersome - I'm using a hex editor to randomly create these things. Anybody inspired enough to create a tool to do this?

For that matter, as neat as they are, they seem almost useless right now. Anyone have any ideas on what you could use something like this for?

That is so very spiffy there dude. :D

That's awesome:D

Hehe, I did this months ago but it didnt seem to work for any1 except me... So no1 cared about it :D

Hey Ari, I have a use for the water spires. It would be sweet to use in a Space age map of some sort. It could be a "beam" that "beams" you onto a spacecraft. At least thats what I thought it was before I read your post...But keep up the good work, it looks cool.

The only problem with using these as you described is that they're permenant features - they're normal terrain, just a little weird.

Quick question: I'm using a hex editor to alter these terrain squares. This is an awful way to do this. It's slow, cumbersome, and it's really hard to see how the terrain is organized (which tiles are next to each other vertically). Anyone have any ideas on how to make this accesable to anybody? For that matter, how hard would it be to write a simple program which created a "map" and let you hex edit a particular tile at will?

Bozo, I remember your post, now but hadn't made the connection (and couldn't remember where it was). I *knew* I'd seen this before. Btw, your way of doing this is way better than mine except that it can't alter water level, as far as I can tell, so it can't create those "water spires"

The thread I'm talking about is here:
http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forums/s...n&pagenumber=1

To repeat what is there, though, there's a way to get the deformation effect without hex editing:

Take your miscdata.txt file (the one found in "UI", *not* the one found in "units") and extract it into the "units" directory in your WC3 directory. For the parameters MaxHeight and MinHeight, alter the values so that they're much higher/lower than they normally are. Also, alter the MaxSlope to 87, to enable vertical cliffs. Now, WE will let you deform terrain to your heart's content.
For reasons beyond my undertanding, though, when this file is present, even in a form that *only* has these 3 parameters, WE will only display a gametime of 00:00 (midnight).
One other trick that I don't think was covered in that thread is that you can alter this file to different Maxslope values, and restart WE to incorporate very different kinds of slopes (gentle, default, sheer) in your map, as long as you save between restarts.