Just in case someone looks again here i will EDIT it to be more exact.
basic view control pretty much standard.
The camera view moved about over the matrix.
up down /arrows forward and back using 'move' command.
arrow left /right to yrotate camera
change camera height with shift/ctrl
( you can use acceleration /inertia on these so as to be able to move very fast when needed )
Advantage of system is you could quickly set your view to include the area you wanted - even in the folds of matrix hills etc - and 'reach out' up/down, left /right, with the mouse to set a tile. If you could see it , you could change it.
Instead of using the mouse cursor, a sphere object rotated with the camera and then was, each loop, set at camera position and then 'moved' forward a small distance to produce a visible cursor effect.
The object yrotated with the camera angle y but in addition had its own yrotate taken from the mouse y and could rotate up/down from x mouse. Thus moved about screen as usual cursor.
The tile 'aimed at' was always in the line of sight, so once you 'mouse clicked' a loop was started and held, in which the object was simply 'moved' forward in small steps and tested for below matrix ground height. WITHOUT SYNCING - of course.
As soon as below ground was detected one divided the x,z co-ord of the object by the tile size ... giving tile x,z.
The matrix was at 0,0,0 but i suppose one could use an offset for both sets of coords.
On my slow computer it could do up to 300 loop steps forward in one sync without any visible slowdown.( you can use quite small step moves for accuracy )
I used keys to set which tile would be pasted before the mouse clicking, but I guess it could be changed at any point.
oh... If the camera is unlikely to be close to a tile the 'move' loop can started from a little way out so as not to waste time.
Aha ...found the thing ...
remember - before this routine the camera and sphere object 22 are rotating together - sphere angles then added to, by current mousex/y
tileselect:
if mouseclick()=2
position object 22, ex#,alt#,zed# ; `` camera coords
move#=20.0 : ` change for scale of matrix/size tile
for x=0 to 150
move object 22, move#
tex#= object position x(22)
twy#= object position y(22)
tzed#= object position z(22)
test# = get ground height( 1, tex#, tzed#)
if twy# < test#
xtile =tex#/333: ztile= tzed#/333 : `333 was tile size
if xtile>-1 and xtile <across and ztile>-1 and ztile <away : ` stops tile number errors
tile(xtile,ztile)=currentile : ` an array store for saving to file
set matrix tile 1,xtile,ztile, currentile
update matrix 1
endif
exit:` once the tile has been changed exit
endif
next x
endif
return
You could do the same thing with newx, newy, and newzvalue by coords and sine/cosine I guess. .. but i just love these simpler methods.
The same method was good enough to jump to the nearest vertex and give continuous raise and lower of vertex height
cheers
