Development Blog

Eager to give the tessellation a go but update not showing here yet.

Just downloaded an update but it won't launch.

Two new DLLs are needed for libcurl, I just added them.

The terrain tessellation is really cool. But I loaded in my game map and the terrain in it is looking more patchworky compared to before. It's more noticeable on the mountains when at a distance. In the image below you can see the difference between an old and new screenshot from the same spot.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n5gl6uiaab6k3bd/patchyterrain.jpg?dl=0

Mine looks patchy too...I increased the texture scale, but can't seem to get it to look like it did before update...Mine is about the same as xtom's...I think Josh needs to look into this...

There is a define in the fragment shader that disables the multi-res tex lookup. You can change this back, I was experimenting with it. It's called USE_LOW_RES_LOOKUP or something similar to that.

Ok think I found it, but not sure, I uncommented line below in shaders/terrain/clipmap.shader

 

#define TERRAIN_LOW_FREQUENCY_BLEND 8.0

 

Looks like it's working as before now.

Hmm the character controller does not conform to the tessellation of the terrain.

It can't, since tessellation is entirely on the GPU.

It can't, since tessellation is entirely on the GPU.

 

Wouldn't it be a good idea to use tessellation for the walkable area of the terrain physics shape also?

 

If this is not done along with the terrain. Feet,tires, even a whole character in the lying down position will get hidden or hover over the terrain.

 

It's not possible to store that many triangles in memory. Tessellation is meant for a small visual offset, not for large features.

I wouldn't use tessellation for the entire physics mesh. I am only talking about close to the character controller. Sort of like updating nav mesh around certain objects.

 

You could use a larger bounding box. Any terrain physics mesh inside the bounding box gets tessellated. Any outside goes back to low poly mesh.

The Tessellation is fantastic Josh, it's made terrain editing fun again!