FlowScape

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FlowScape is a "game" where you create landscapes by sculpting the landscape, placing or "painting" objects on it like plants, rocks, animals, etc., and then setting the lighting and effects for maximum beauty, while dangerously relaxing music plays in the background.

I installed it and messed around with it for 30-45 minutes this morning before work. In that time, without having any idea what I was doing or scratching the surface of what you can do with it, I came up with these:




I cannot imagine a more peaceful, meditative experience to be had on a computer, and that results in such attractive results with so little effort and/or artistic ability.

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Tonight on my Twitch stream I started from a bare square of land and built this, in under an hour and a half. And a lot of that time was spent dicking around with the photography settings.

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Yes, I know it looks like a Thomas Kinkade fever dream. That's not the point.

[RealNC]

I can totally see this as an easy to use tool to create rooms for adventure games.

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At least half, he exaggerated (slightly), of the positive Steam reviews mention having used it to build D&D maps.

I wanted to export them into NoLimits so I could build roller coasters on 'em. Unfortunately you can't do that. But that leaves us with the question of which is nerdier?

[Jizaboz]

This is neat. It kind of reminds me of creating realistic nature “visual boxes” that I used to import detailed backgrounds into Doom3. But with this you get more satisfaction along with not having to use math (but mostly trial and error and waiting) for fractals.

I really like the scene with the bridge you made.

[Tdarcos]

These are absolutely beautiful. If this is generating a 3d landscape, can it be exported, in a format other programs can use, like .3DS (3d Studio), .DXF (Autodesk) or (preferrably) .DAE (Collada)?

I did the Mars Statue and the Octagon lamp using Trimble Sketchup, because while it does have its own (undocumented) internal file format, it can export to .DAE files.

I've seen some wonderful looking landscapes designed as add-on maps for Half Life 2 and the episodes and related (Half Life 2, HL2 Episode 1, HL2 Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Portal 2, Portal 2 Paint Gun), which for simplicity I'll refer to all of these as "HL2". There are a number of issues.

1. The source files that describe the maps for HL2 have to be "compiled" into an undocumented / weakly documented binary format. When people distribute maps for HL2, this is the format they are releasing them in.
2. You might like a segment of one HL2 map and a different segment of another, and like to combine those features as part of some other map. You could conceivably do that with Doom .Wad files and Duke Nukem 3d .Map files. Trimble Sketchup is designed to allow you to take components out of other designs and reuse them. You can't really do this with HL2 maps.
3. I've been able to do nice things in Trimble Sketchup by borrowing from others. Adding a revolving door, a fire door, a fire alarm pull station, a vending machine, or an elevator to a building or structure from someone else's component is almost trivial, and makes it easier to do mine and improves the realism in my project.
4. Conversely, I've been able to create stand-alone components in Trumble Sketchup that others can use (gates, staircases, gratings, an articulated bus, a paratransit van, etc.)
5. In many cases I've built components in Trimble Sketchup by combining and improving other people's (lesser) components.
6. Reverse engineeering HL2 maps to get source back has about the same luck as decompiling binary programs (maybe less) and editing these decompiled maps is unlikely to work well, meaning changes or combinations of other maps really can't be made.
7. Learning the editor for Doom was easy.(say half an hour to be functional, and anywhere from a couple hours to a day to get good).
8. Learning the editor for Duke Nukem 3d is a little harder but didn't require a huge effort to do reasonable work. (Maybe a couple hours to learn and two or three days to get good).
9. Learning to use Trimble Sketchup was not very hard and with a little practice and help from a reference book or the on-line documentation it increases your productivity. (Again, maybe a couple hours to learn the basics and 3-4 days to get good.)
10. The learning curve on all of these is gradual. There is a simplified nap editor for Portal 2, but it provides s limited capability and does not allow you to access all the features of the game engine, nor can you create maps for anything except Portal 2.
11. To go beyond the limited subset of capabilitirs the Simplified Portal 2 Editor provides, or to be able to make maps for any of the other games in the HL2 franchise / universe, requires the use of the full Valve Hammer editor.
12. The creation of an add-on map source code for HL2 maps to get the full capacity of all the features of the underlying game engine requires the use of the Valve Hammer editor. That desktop application is, to put it bluntly, a "bastard spawn from hell" and brings new meaning to the term "user hostile."
13. The learning curve for Valve Hammer is not merely steep; it is damn near vertical. It is difficult to learn, dificult to use, and easy to make mistakes. I'd say the effort to learn to use the Hammer editor and have even reasonable profuciency is equivalent to the time needed to learn a new programming language (several weeks, minimum.) It very well fits the term "drop the hammer on them," as using that program to create maps is like trying to carve stone with sandpaper and a toothbrush. It brings new meaning to the term "painful."

I would hope this program helps solve some of the problem something like HL2 generates and Trimble Sketchup tries to solve.

[Tdarcos]

Please note, I wrote the above while some of you were writing your replies, plus I fell asleep in the middle so the response took several hours.

[Tdarcos]

Having seen the comments, I realize that Flowscape, in effect, just allows you to "paint" things on a canvas. It doesn't create things you can, for example, "stand in" and do 360⁰ look at the environment around you.

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These are absolutely beautiful.

Thank you!

If this is generating a 3d landscape, can it be exported, in a format other programs can use, like .3DS (3d Studio), .DXF (Autodesk) or (preferrably) .DAE (Collada)?

I very much wish it did, but sadly, it seems only intended to do what it does -- let you design your landscape and then take snapshots of it. No exporting feature is available. It is, as the developer states, "a game, not a dev tool". Another quote: "There is no export as this is not aimed at devs or complex 3d software users. (This would be a toy to them)..." Indeed!

You CAN go the other way, though -- importing models from 3D tools into your scene.

(fifty thousand pages of stuff about Half-Life 2 for some reason)

I would hope this program helps solve some of the problem something like HL2 generates and Trimble Sketchup tries to solve.

It does not. It solves no problems except for anxiety and depression.

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Having seen the comments, I realize that Flowscape, in effect, just allows you to "paint" things on a canvas. It doesn't create things you can, for example, "stand in" and do 360⁰ look at the environment around you.

Sure you can. It's a fully 3D environment. Pressing "F", in fact, puts you in first-person mode, allowing you to walk around your landscape. But that's just camera manipulation -- you could do the same thing by swooping the camera in. First-person mode just keeps the camera at ground level.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

So you can't export this stuff in a 3D game because it is not a dev tool ... which would mean that if there were people out there, say, making games with 2D images, you could take screenshots and use them?

And nobody could STOP YOU?

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And who would want to?!

[Flack]

I can totally see this as an easy to use tool to create rooms for adventure games.

That was my first thought, followed by book covers.

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If that is an interest of some of the people here, then depending on the rooms/maps you wanted to generate, I might actually suggest Planet Coaster as an alternative. Planet Coaster has become such a design phenomenon, there are large numbers of designers who never touch the coaster/ride/theme park aspects, and just build architecture and landscapes.

It has far more flexibility than FlowScape in terms of what you can build -- particularly in terms of architecture. FlowScape has the benefit of being faster and easier to QUICKLY lay down a reasonable looking, attractive landscape.

[Tdarcos]

lowScape has the benefit of being faster and easier to QUICKLY lay down a reasonable looking, attractive landscape.

It kind of hit me. Flowscape allows people to do on the computer what Bob Ross did on the TV: produce stunning landscape images in half an hour.

If you never saw Bob Ross' TV show, let me tell you, he was amazing. Starting from a blank canvas he would show you how to produce a professional-looking landscape painting in half an hour. And there was no camera tricks, he really did it in ½ an hour. Bur nevertheless, it never was as easy as he made it look. Probably if you watched his show, then watched it again while painting, then rewound the tape / backspaced the DVD as needed, you could probably learn to do something similar.

[AArdvark]

We all drank vodka and watched Bob Ross make happy little trees, trust me.

[AArdvark]

I like the MTV promo he did

[Flack]

If you never saw Bob Ross' TV show, let me tell you, he was amazing. Starting from a blank canvas he would show you how to produce a professional-looking landscape painting in half an hour. And there was no camera tricks, he really did it in ½ an hour. Bur nevertheless, it never was as easy as he made it look. Probably if you watched his show, then watched it again while painting, then rewound the tape / backspaced the DVD as needed, you could probably learn to do something similar.

This sounds pretty amazing. It's too bad this guy never made it big or anything. I would totally watch that.

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If you never saw Bob Ross' TV show, let me tell you, he was amazing.

Is it still on? What channel/time, I gotta check this out!