48 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 2,803.3 hrs on record (271.4 hrs at review time)
Posted: 11 Sep, 2019 @ 12:12pm
Updated: 11 Sep, 2019 @ 12:19pm

My favorite purchase all year.

If you're wondering what I've been able to do with FlowScape that led to my review, you can take a look at all of my projects here.

I knew the moment I laid eyes on this, I would most likely love it. It exceeded my expectations as a casual design & illustration tool that just about anyone can use. I have spent many hours putting together village & macro background scenes. The Sculpting tool allow you to create mountains, hills, lakes, rivers, as I see fit. The Painting tool allows you to create walkways. I can construct anything from realistic waterfalls to lost ruins with the Transformation tool to manipulate just about any object.

The ease of use combined with your imagination can create just about anything you desire as far as nature & medieval villages are concerned. You can also import 3D objects of your own & use them right on FS.

"I heard that FS can run really slow."

This is for those that want to run FS on high settings but are unsure of performance. You have the ability to increase the size of your terrain to do bigger projects than the default-rendered scenes FS creates for you upon opening the program. However, the more resources you use on your terrain, the more dependent FS will be on RAM & VRAM for animated resources. For example, if you put a large amount of a small resource such as grass on a large terrain with 8 GB of RAM and a GPU with 3 GB of VRAM, you may notice a significant impact on your FPS - especially around the completion of your project.

You can get around this by applying grass-based ground instead, which will be much better on your FPS but limits the diversification of your ground & make your mountains look strange. It boils down to how you use your static & animated resources on each project, how much of it you use, how big your terrains are, & your performance settings.

Is it user-friendly?

Yes & no. The program is a great entry level tool, but it lacks a tooltip system that identifies what you select on the UI & lacks a universal tutorial on importing 3D objects. That will give people that do not use Blender or other related programs a difficult time understanding the process of importing .OBJ files into FS for custom projects. I do believe the developer is working on both of these.

There are some serious (and some even critical) issues I need to address.

While I love FS, I have to give the developer a little bit of scolding. This is entirely my opinion & experience, but I figured I should mention it publicly.

1.) FS lacks choice confirmations for saving projects. When creating a various number of projects, you'll find it is important not to accidentally overwrite them by mistake. Unfortunately, FS does not have a confirmation asking you to confirm if you want to overwrite a save. It just saves it. Because the saves are close together in the save interface, you could easily save over a project that took hours (or days in my case) for you to create at the slip of the mouse & accidental click. This is something I would like to see rectified as soon as possible.

2.) FS lacks choice confirmation for right click deletions of objects. FS gives you the ability to delete an entire set of objects. For example, you make 100 trees, but change your mind & decide to delete them. You can hover over the type of tree you created and right-click to delete it. But there is a big problem with this. The problem is - right click is also used for looking around your terrain landscape & works in conjunction with your movements. There was a time when I hover over an object while looking around & accidentally delete all of the village buildings after hours of transforming them, and cannot undo this action like you can others. I would like to see right click deletions get a confirmation as well.

This is also a similar issue with using Clear to remove all paint. The problem is doing so accidentally. Only the Sculpting Reset option has a confirmation as far as I'm aware.

3.) The copy/paste feature is bugged. You have the ability to copy & paste objects to streamline your project in case you need to duplicate (for example, street lights). However, the undo key brings the pasted object back to you, making you have to replace everything. Pasted objects also have a habit of going missing when you reopen saved projects. Some pasted objects cannot be deleted & even reappear on re-loaded saves when the mistake was never saved.

4.) The sculpting tool has a glitch that makes the land look like it is boiling sometimes, creating a mess. I've only been able to rectify this issue on reload.

Sculpting can also be difficult because your left mouse click is required to drag the strength & brush settings, a slight miss of the mouse can create major terrain mistakes (spikes & bottomless holes) that can take a while to fix. It would be nice if there was another way to move the settings.

FS also doesn't remember all of your sculpting & painting settings on reload. You'll need to set them again each time you load them. If you have very specific settings, this can be frustrating.

These are setbacks, but it does not create a negative experience for me. I still love FS.

The developer is very active.

The good news is that you can tell the developer loves this project & what the community creates with it. So any problem you have is definitely being examined. This is one of those games/programs you could end up seeing an update powered by your suggestion, so you can buy this without worrying that it and you will be neglected.

I wish the developer the best & am very thankful for such an incredible experience. I'll probably put thousands of hours on it & look forward to all of the great updates coming in the future.
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6 Comments
1stKaiser 16 Mar, 2020 @ 1:48pm 
Thanks for chiming in! This is now outdated though. I have a major update to provide after spending so much time on it. I'm just waiting for the next planned update before I say anything. :)
ρоѕιтяои_ 16 Mar, 2020 @ 1:44pm 
Thanks for the Informative review.:Notes01:
kinglioman 3 Dec, 2019 @ 1:17am 
@kepano_808Hl

he may have used a lower texture quality i know for a fact the game pics can look ten times better since i use max settings

Kepano_808HI 14 Sep, 2019 @ 2:21pm 
your pics don't look as good as the store page does....is this you or does the game really do that quality and the page is a lie?
Eterna 11 Sep, 2019 @ 3:26pm 
This review is very well deserve it. You are absolutely right. I never will be tired of Flow Scape, and I am sure this is a game hard to forget.
Meraki 11 Sep, 2019 @ 12:36pm 
Awwww one of the best, or maybe the best analysis I've ever seen on steam
:vanilla2::Speech_Love:
Reading all this makes me smile~ and wanting to buy the game again :p