Then what is your reasoning for having terrain and interiors?
Interiors provided a unique environment, giving you the feeling that you were lego in a normal world. It was cool to be in the bedroom because it felt like you were actually a toy in a bedroom. Building the bedroom out of bricks does not convery this same feel, because you see the studs and the brick side textures.
You cannot replicate the bedroom well with bricks, and large scale interior replicas "would only look worse with our current shading system."
this is an interior. Notice the indoor shading, notice how it isn't two-toned? See how the light bounces and it looks like the room was well lit?
Now
this is an interior replica. It's two tone, you can clearly see the build lines, and looks no where near as good. There is no indoor shading, and looks terrible running shaders on max, in fact, it looks better with them OFF (aka, the v20 version looks better than the v21 version)!
Terrain provided an efficient way to play large scale maps. You could load up a terrain of massive size that would outperform any brick build of the same size. It was easy to set up a quick game, get people to join, and have fun with other players. Running a huge brick map on a toaster would lag, but it would perform well on a terrain map. Talk about optimization, taking the scale of 256,000 bricks and compacting it into 1, efficient, object!
If you put two seconds of effort into designing a terrain map it might turn out decent.
As opposed to putting two hours into a brick map. Terrain provided a large scale playing field for the average guy to enjoy. He didn't have to slave away to get large scale fun.
Terrain was easy to edit, with terraforming tools allowing you to make a large scale map easily. Building a large scale brick map is completely "unoptimized".
Terrain floats, it's just a warped, subdivided plane. This allows for it to perform fast, while conveying the image that it's actually land. However, brick terrain needs support underneath. This causes a serious waste of bricks making a patchy mess underneath to keep up the terrain. You could overwrite it and make the bricks float, but then you lose support for building on them because if you use the hammer on something you placed on it, it doesn't work (would chain kill the terrain bricks) and if you use the wand, it would chain kill the terrain bricks.
Terrain bricks suck. They overwrite the water and zone layer, seriously limiting potential. Zones, water, and terrain bricks all share the same layer, making it really annoying to build.
Terrain collision is superior to brick collision. If you are trying to be efficient and OPTIMIZE your map using large cubes for terrain, vehicles can fly/drive right through them.
You could ski on terrain. On bricks, you hit awkward angles, fall through the bricks, or just don't move at all.
Terrain loaded incredibly fast. You didn't have to sit and ghost, and you could jump right into the action.
I am not for terrain, I am for the functions and efficiency of terrain. I want a brick terraform editor. To make a large scale brick map, I had to use a generator and a script to allow floating bricks, yet it's still almost over the brickcount.
This is what it looks like. As a mapper, you know that this is probably the most efficient way to make brick terrain. it replicates the efficiency of game terrain, while using bricks. The problem is that, even though it is efficient brick-count wise (not really, just in comparison to other methods), the game doesn't support it well at all.
You cannot build on it, like i said. Hammer doesn't work, because it chain kills the "terrain". Wand does the same. It's a pain when people fall through it, it's a pain to ghost, it's a pain to save. it's a pain to load. All around, the game doesn't support large scale stuff like this very well. Terrain did it much better, and for a fraction of the cost.
It's disgraceful how they were simply cut out and no alternative was provided. It's not wishing for terrain back, it's wishing for new efficient features to replace the old efficient features that were removed.
Poll