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Terraforming
The land occupied by a coaster can be terraformed. The
terrain is a
grid of height points that can be raised or lowered. By default a
coaster track does not have any terrain at all (flat land).
Terrain Settings
Before the land can be terraformed, a few settings have to be made in
the Terrain Settings which can be found in the Scenery Menu.
The Terrain Settings are broken up into 3 basic sections, Mode,
Land and Water. The Mode section right at the top determines the
general appereance of the terrain. If the terrain is disabled, no
terraforming can be done and the land will be entirely flat (default).
The terrain detail determines the size of the terrain grid. The higher
the detail level, the higher the polygon count and the more accurate
you can modify the land. Any settings within the Land and Water section
can be changed at any time. Changing the Mode settings will remove,
reset or resample the Terrain Structure. Therefor it is
recommended to set these options at the very beginning before doing the
terraforming.

The Terrain Settings
The Land and Water settings make it possible to choose which
textures should be used.
A lot of predefined settings for Land and Water are available that will
suit the beginners needs. I.e. Simply click Grass to set the
Land texture to an included grass texture. Custom made textures can be
applied by clicking on browse. All textures must be either 128
x 128, 256 x 256, or 512 x 512. While a texture of 1024 x 1024 is a
valid size, it is not recommended. Only high-end video cards with a lot
of video memory will be able to display these textures.
Ground is the texture that represent the coloring of
the ground itself.
Repeats determines how many times the Ground texture
is repeated across the entire terrain.
Detail is the actually detail of the ground. It is
basically a gray scale light map.
Repeats determines how many times the Detail texture
is repeated across the entire terrain.
Water is the texture for the liquid. This can be
any liquid really, but commonly is water.
Repeats determines how many times the Water texture
is repeated across the entire terrain.
Reflection is how much of the track, sky, terrain is
reflected in the water texture. The value determines how much the
actual Water texture shows through the reflection. A value
of max means that no water texture will show through giving a
very unrealistic perfect mirror effect. A value of off means
that the water texture will show through entirely leaving nothing of
the reflection itself.
Waves controls the wave strength of the water.
Terrain editing
If a the coaster contains a terrain, terraforming can be done
by switching to the 3D-view and selecting the 1x1, 3x3 or 5x5
terraforming edit mode from the menu or by clicking on the
corresponding toolbar buttons. The terraforming edit mode toolbar
buttons are not visible by default. The toolbar can be customized by
choosing Customize Toolbar... from the Windows menu.
The terraforming mode determines the affected size of the area the user
can alter. To change the height of a piece of land, drag the area with
the mouse. By holding the shift-key while dragging, the area will be
leveled first.

Editing Terrain
The Water level is right under height zero. To get the water
visible, the land has to be lowered under zero. It is recommended to
first layout the coaster track and do the terraforming at the last step.
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