Terrain

[Delerna]

I have had leadwerks now for a while but up to this point I have only been tinkering with it.

 

I have (probably unrealistic) dreams of a largish open world game set in ancient greece.

So I have set myself the goal of discovering whether leadwerks and especially myself are capable

of the above.

 

Over the past couple of days I have been playing around with the terrain editor to see whether I could put together a large map and it's comming along quite nicely for 2 days work.

So I thought I might post a couple of screenshots.

 

This terrain started life as a greyscale heightmap that I extracted from a dem of Greece with free software that I downloaded from the internet

as told by this site http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=27052

 

Greece is probably too large for an effective terrain so I used paint dot net and reduced it to just the Peloponnesus.

I am starting to think that even that might be too large since the FPS is down to between 30 and 50 frames depending on how much of the terrain is in front of the camera.

Anyway, It will be interresting to see how quickly the framerate bogs down once I start adding houses etc. I have plans for about 5 major towns on this terrain

I have ideas for getting around the bogs but, for me, these are just theoritical until I try them out.

 

Ayway, here are the screenshots.

There is still a heap of work to do but I am pleased with the results so far

 

This one is the heightmap of the peloponnesus and I have marked the aproximate locations of where I took the other 3 shots from

 

1 is looking towards 2

 

2 is looking towards 3

 

3 is looking back at 1 on the right and 2 on the left

 

When is the next version of leadwerks comming, I need more texture slots

and I need the river nodes

and I need .....

 

Any pearls of wisdom that those who have experience with this sort of thing are prepared to share are appreciated.

[Canardia]

I was planning to try to make terrains out of multiple smaller models instead. Having one big terrain slows down the FPS and load times, and you still need models for making overhangs and other 3D terrain constructs.

 

Perhaps it will work with Blender's sculpt feature, I need to try it.

The benefits of model terrains are:

1) You don't need to load terrain which you don't see, which should result in faster overall FPS also

2) You can have more than 5 textures

3) You can have 3D terrain

4) You can stream terrain from a sqlite database, so there is no zoning and loading times

5) You can resize the game window and the terrain is not destroyed

[Delerna]

I am concentrating on terraforming more than the textures at the moment.

Looking for places where I can split the terrain into multiple terrains should that become necessary

 

 

Good points Lumooja.

That's actually one of my ideas also (multiple models instead of 1 large terrain)

Providing all of my terraforming comes out when I export the the hieghtmap I was thinking I might be able to use another software I have that can convert the terrain into a model.

I can then cut up the model into pieces that are then guaranteed to be the correct size in relation to each other.

 

Maybe I am going overboard...I don't know yet

 

Edit

I was also thinking that there are many places in a terrain where the player can never go.

The tops of steep cliffed moutains for example.

For these a billboard might suffice, perhaps one shaped like a tent or a pyramid.

I know it's not a billboard then but the term illustrates the idea well.

A simple shape that relies on its textures to give it definition

[Flexman]

GROME is a commercial editor built for creating large terrains and slicing them up for export. It's been used in a number of high profile games. You would have to do everything in the GROME editor though and it's a bit of a leap going from one to the other. Blender may do this also?

 

Another important consideration if you're going to make a large environment is the dreaded 'jiggle' which comes with math errors associated with moving large distances from the scene origin (typically 20,000 units+) this results in shadows and geometry jiggling around when the camera matrix is updated. So depending on how big your world needs to be you might need to build your game around a "treadmill", resetting the scene origin seamlessly as you move through the world. Or render the scene in layers to maintain camera and z buffer precision.

 

Lumoojas streaming idea would make this practical. It's not a trival exercise but not impractical either. Many MMOs and simulations do this. So far it's not been done in Leadwerks, as far as I know. Maybe someone has an example already?