Modelling terrain is a pain in the neck. The geo-mode in Dedit is powerful, but not powerful enough in my opinion. You simply can't work with the number of triangles necessary to make terrain as detailed as that which appears in the game, using Dedit, because the vertex editing tools have some major limitations.

You can at least make it look passable though. Koyasha and Neo have outlined the modelling side, so let's assume that you have read that, and you now have a nice big wall of rock in front of you. The first thing to do is hit CTRL+B to go into brush mode, select all of the triangles which make up your terrain and hit SHIFT+J to join them together.

If you have any textures which don't line up correctly, select your brush, right click on it and select TEXTURE->Reset texture coordinates. This will remove any panning or size changes which have been made to the textured faces, and all of the faces should line up properly.

Go into the properties of your new rocky-mountain and make sure that the lighting is set to Gourad. Save, process then run. Your rocks should look kind of like this:

Notice how the edges are very harsh? In all 3D packages there is a surface property, usually called smoothing, which changes the way that light is mapped across edges to give the effect that there aren't any edges. In this way, a sphere can be created in 3D and look effective without having billions of polys. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do this in Dedit?

Well, you can

Go into the properties of your brush again, and select LightControl:

You should get this panel:

Now see down the bottom, the field called CreaseAngle? This is the smoothing control. The value of the field is the maximum angle at which an edge is smoothed. It defaults to 45 °, so edges with an angle from 0 ° - 45 ° will be smoothed, which is not really smooth enough for most terrain. Set it to 180 °, which means that pretty much every edge will be smoothed.

Save, process and run. Your rocks should look like this:

Much better

Madonna is famous for re-inventing herself, so also her look. It's amazing, she suddenly looks like a totally different person! Which of these looks you think M looks the best with? Remember, this is just a selection of her looks, I picked out 15. Madonna had waaayyy more looks, even blue hair. But it would become to difficult to choose. I couldn't post 15 pictures, so there are some links you have to click in order to see the picture. I voted for 2000. I also love the outfit!

1984: MTV video music awards

1986: MTV video music awards

http://www.madonnalicious.com/images/1986/mtv2.jpg

1987: Who's That Girl? movie

http://www.madonna-online.ch/m-online/gall...vid-cap_093.jpg

1989: Like A Prayer video

1991: Academy awards

1992: Fever video

http://www.madonna-online.ch/m-online/vide...x/fever_034.jpg

1993: Rain video

1994: The Late Show with David Letterman

http://www.madonnalicious.com/images/1994/...erman_show6.jpg

1995: MTV video music awards

1996: Evita Premiere in Los Angeles

1998: Academy awards

2000: European MTV awards

2001: Paradise (Not For Me) video

2002: Star commercial

http://www.madonna-online.ch/m-online/gall...bmw-pic_010.jpg

2003: American Life video

http://www.madonnalicious.com/images/2003/...canlife_ns2.jpg

2005: Versace Ad Campaign

I get asked from time to time how do the SFI servers run so smoothly. People set up a server and it's choppy or laggy.

Nolf 2 doomsday is a resource intensive server but you can assist it with a neat trick.

I call it stacking the bandwith in favour of the server.

In your server.txt (or player.txt) you have bandwith setting variables

BandwidthClient = 3

BandwidthServer = 4

BandwidthServerCustom = 1000

BandwidthClientCustom = 600

Note how the values are higher for the server. This greatly assists in it's keeping up with 16 clients of various connection speeds (the above settings are the ones I use in the SFI DD Server)

another trick is setting the run speed to 140

You can do the same "trick" on Contract Jack servers as well

Stay tuned for more server tips to come