What is FlowScape?
FlowScape is an easy to use nature scene creator aimed at casual users who would like to chill after a busy day and create something nice from a large library of models, textures and sound fx. You can take photos of your creation or record a video with your favorite capture app.
The design philosophy behind FlowScape will always be to keep it as intuitive as possible.
What cant it do?
FlowScape is not a design program like 3D Studio Max or Maya, there is no import or export. If you want to make more complex scenes, there are dozens of technical programs you can use that give you far more flexibility than you can with FlowScape, but the tradeoff will be a high learning curve.
What are your plans for the future?
Much more content is planned so that you have a larger variety of fauna to create more unique scenes, as well as exposing more camera settings to allow you to take better pictures. VR support is coming soon, Mac and Linux is done. I will look into import (easy) and maybe export (not so easy), but no promises as this might be beyond the time i have available.
Troubleshooting guide:
The best way to install and run FlowScape is to use the itch.io app
There are a few advantages of using this, it lets you manage multiple installs, resumes downloads if you lose connection, sets permissions on MacOs, and has an option to check for updates and only install what is new, usually a few megabytes.
If you are still having trouble, you can Re-install
There are a few other things you can try.
If you are stuck at the loading screen, give it a bit of time, its loading a lot of textures.
Clicking on the screen while loading, could cause it to crash.
A program called Citrix has been known to cause trouble with Unity based apps. Check that you don't have it installed, and disable it if you do.
On some Macs you can try windowed mode instead of fullscreen
Hopefully this will fix any issues you are having
Below are a few tips and tricks to get you started.
You can right click on any icon and it will delete any object of that type
Pointing at something and pressing delete will delete that object
Holding Delete for more than 1 second will turn to continuous delete mode
You can Delete everything with CTRL Delete
Moving Rotating and Scaling can be activated with 1,2 and 3 rather than pressing on the toolbar
Backspace will undo the last paint, up to 8 times (working on redo for the next release)
Rotate the sun in the camera settings or press 8 4 6 2 on your keypad to fine tune it
Use the layers (top right) to determine if you paint on water, rocks or land
If you set the flow slider all the way to the left, it lets you place single items, useful for animals
Clicking on the FPS button top left, will toggle VSync
You can turn water on or off and also make it endless instead of box in the texture settings
You can change the height of your terrain in the texture settings to make more or less water
You can zoom right out and set the FOV of the camera all the way to the left for an isometric look
Clicking on the hint bar that pops up every 5 minutes displays the next hint
Create a rock and scale it really big for a bigger terrain, just be careful with delete as you might delete the rock
Painting tiny trees will make your landscape look bigger
The textures menu also has an slider to make the tiling smaller
If FlowScape is not saving your screenshots, it may be due to permissions. Some things to try is to right click on your icon and choose Run as Administrator. Or move the game to a non system drive such as D: