shadeers, spherical terrain, LOD, tiles and more..

[shadmar]

Hello

 

I'm just a 2 hour experienced Leadwerks trial user, from what I see it looks great.

I've currently used 3drad the last 2.5 years and wanted to look around abit.

 

My questions are (sorry if dome are asked before) but..

 

1. I have some HLSL shaders i've written for 3drad, are they possible to use in LW (if converted to GLSL) and can I apply these on terrain or custom meshes ?

2. Can I tile terrains and move them / clone them runtime ?

3. Can a terrain be spherical if I wanted to do a whole planet ? And how would physics (radial gforce?) work.

4. Is LW a fps engine? I can't seem to find any flightsims examples (in my limited forum access) - Can this be achived :

(done in 3drad using tiled terrain patches so it virtually infinte)

5. I get about 25 fps loading the arctic scene, I do realize that my dell xps laptop 8600M GT card isn't the top notch, but there must be ways to run this for lower specced cards by optimizations ?

 

Thanks for reading

[Marleys Ghost]

I get about 25 fps loading the arctic scene, I do realize that my dell xps laptop 8600M GT card isn't the top notch, but there must be ways to run this for lower specced cards by optimizations ?

 

 

Anisotropic Filter = 1

Texture Quality = Very low

Physics Quality = Fast

Model Detail = Low

Shadows Quality = Disabled

 

Turn off all FX

 

[AggrorJorn]

Hi Shadmar and welcome to the forum.

 

I'm not familiar with HLSL so can t help you with that. What I do know:

 

4: LW is not per direct for FPS only. i know that there is a topic where someone is making a flight simulator. There is also a topic that goes about extenting terrain. The Terrain editor in the editor has a limit of 4096 I believe but it is possible to extend it.

5:The Artic scene uses ofcourse a lot of trees. The trees have in total 3 models: 1 normal model, Level of detail model 1 (lesser polygons), Level of detail model 2 (even fewer polygons). By setting the distance for every model, you can use more of the LOD varaints instead of the trees that require more models. You can also set the billboards (plane with texture) active. Also setting the shadow quality produced by the directional light might do the trick.

 

What kind of graphical options have you turned on? like bloom, god rays, anisotropic filter etc..

[flachdrache]

Hi

1.

I didnt tested it myself (guessing) but LE supports levelofdetail (LOD models) - if the lower lods are tiling as well no seams should appear but there would be no stitching going on like in "real" lod terrain. So i would expect "sparclies" - like tiny white dots appear where surfacepoints dont align up perfectly.

 

2.

If the tiles are equal in size (like in 1. - terrain tiles) and no strange size like 128m 13.21cm is used, copy and past or cloning works at runtime (in the editor) but for infinity terrain you would like to do that in the code depending on camera world position imho.

 

3.

Another point i didnt worked out myself but tried with my XNA project. However i couldnt get the vertex texture fetch (vtf) doing it right - mountains where bending/skewing in all different directions but if one can write such a shader like for spherical clipmaps i dont see a reason why it shouldnt work - using imposters for distant clouds and planets, maybe instanced models for the rings of saturn etc. a "galaxy quest" might even be possible. Dont know for the gforce tough, we use 9,2 for gravity iirc but it can be set with "SetWorldGravity" it might be possible to set the value based on volume contents or normal but thats beyond my focus for the time being - other certainly know more about physics in LE.

 

hth

 

[edit] : ""http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force""

PS : cloning and tiling always works tbh. but aligning them up might be challenging

[shadmar]

Hey again, and thanks for the instant friendly replies

 

 

Anisotropic Filter = 1

Texture Quality = Very low

Physics Quality = Fast

Model Detail = Low

Shadows Quality = Disabled

 

Turn off all FX

Yes this gave me a few, but decreasing number of trees was even better, thanks.

 

 

4: LW is not per direct for FPS only. i know that there is a topic where someone is making a flight simulator. There is also a topic that goes about extenting terrain. The Terrain editor in the editor has a limit of 4096 I believe but it is possible to extend it.

I will do some testing thanks

 

1.

I didnt tested it myself (guessing) but LE supports levelofdetail (LOD models) - if the lower lods are tiling as well no seams should appear but there would be no stitching going on like in "real" lod terrain. So i would expect "sparclies" - like tiny white dots appear where surfacepoints dont align up perfectly.

 

I think I can get the stiching to align up by creating tiles that are always at y=0 around the edges, you might think that it will look strange and very manufactured, but from what I did in rad, it worked pretty well.

 

2.

If the tiles are equal in size (like in 1. - terrain tiles) and no strange size like 128m 13.21cm is used, copy and past or cloning works at runtime (in the editor) but for infinity terrain you would like to do that in the code depending on camera world position imho.

 

Not sure I got this, you mean just in the editor? What if I wanted to use 9 x 4096x4096 terrains in a threadmill (move the back tiles depending on your position) so my terrain never ends? Is this possible runtime in a game. Imagine a jet flying in a straight line and then just reuse terrain tiles over and over like a threadmill.

[flachdrache]

Treadmill constructed like a compass - the camera/player is flying over a single tile and if the next tile should appear you clone and move the same tilable terraintile depending on tilesize and cameraposition imo. However, spherical clipmaps would be the nices solution.

[shadmar]

Thanks JTimm, I don't have access to the other forums, but has anyone done clipmaps in LW using GLSL shaders before or something similar ?

I've only done very basic vertex shader clipmaps in HLSL, no texturing and not spherical.

I know there are some sources / papers on this around the net / nvidea's gpu gems etc.

What I'm really asking is there any severe limitations I could run into using LW if I want to start a project like this?

 

Thanks.

[flachdrache]

Iam not aware of public realeased clipmap shaders.

 

What I'm really asking is there any severe limitations I could run into using LW if I want to start a project like this?

 

Not that iam aware of - however i work on FPS with the buildIn terrain entity and solve my issues if they appear.

So thats a tough question.

 

You could browse through the LE engine features (the public files), the wiki and the old forum (be aware of that at least the old forum is quit outdated e.g. holds questions long time solved)

 

""http://www.leadwerks.com/engine_materials.html""

""http://www.leadwerks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page""

""http://www.leadwerks.com/forum/"" --> old

 

hth