For a long time now, I've wanted a 'hood with a kind of post-apocolyptic feel to it. Now, houses, sims and landscaping I can do. The Create-a-World tool however, is no friend of mine. I hate the poxy thing. I can't get what I want out of it, and thus the project sits abandoned in the dust.

I thought a large, nearly flat desert would be a good start. You know, rolling sand dunes, some flattened areas for communities and a large oasis. Perhaps a mine. But if I could create such a thing, I wouldn't be here right now.

I want it so the camera can never quite see the edge of the world on any side - with one edge perhaps entering into a sea. The worlds with big square cut offs look plain silly to me.

So where do I start? I tried a height map generator but that left me with what looked like someones 5 o clock shadow put under a microscope. Help!

I'm dealing with a very similar problem with my current CAW project. The terrain is rolling hills, but not mountains. One edge breaks out into a very large lake, so if there's just water in that direction, it's okay.

Have you looked at the non-routing paint? There's one for the Sims and there's one for the camera. I'd start by painting the edges of your terrain with both non-routing paints. Then I'd raise hills around the entire edge and paint those with both non-routing paints. This will keep the "outside" not visible to at least your Sims. I'm still experimenting with how much of the outer edge of the terrain has to be devoted to this "edge of the world" barrier to keep up the illusion of continuing land, for those times when you pull the camera out to a high view.

As for dealing with height maps, yeah. I devoted a lot of time to experimenting with painting, importing and seeing what terrain was produced. Going back and re-painting, etc. It's important to make your gray tones in the height map as smooth as possible, else you'll get "prickly" terrain. Never did achieve the smoothness I was looking for, and certainly smaller terrain features I could never scale properly outside CAW, leading to plenty of sculpting inside of CAW. My next experiment is to export the terrain map back into a grayscale image after I've done some modification in CAW. I will learn better how the terrain features translate between the map and CAW. Then maybe begin a second version of my world.

Okay, I should admit I was over-optimistic. I don't know how to export a CAW terrain back into a grayscale image. The controls that I thought did this apparently do something else.

For this world I would probably use the Egypt Distant Terrain, and then just manually terraform the dunes. Mainly because I've tried to play with height maps, but they came out awful.

Meresimp @ TS3CC is working on a similar concept, you can check it out here;
http://builders.forumotion.net/wip-...-world-t485.htm

@Suncat - I'll have to fire it up at some point, had no idea there was a non-routing paint. The UI is flecking carp. I don't mind making a HUUUUUGE map, so long as I don't need to plant/water/adddecor to the out-of-bounds bits. My idea was to have several small communities and a downtown. I mean REALLY small. So, having large parts of the map unused is not an issue.

@auntielynds - Even that world is becoming far too cheerful for my liking. I liked the terraforming initially, but it's getting too pretty now. O for me to be able to use the tool with the same level of skill.

Generally, my current feelings with this hunkajunk can be summarised to three letters: Grr.

More digging to be done.

Actually, it's a beta. I haven't seen a beta from anyone where this isn't true. And that probably includes the betas I've produced.

Perhaps the case, but I suspect EA has a little more funding to play with than yourself :P

I shall keep trying anyway, been doing some reading so have more of an idea on how to get what I want out of it.