Terrain: planned features / wish list

[Rastar]

Now that the new terrain system is in the works and seems to be getting awesome, I would be interested what features are planned aside from the new texturing method... Here is my wish list

 

- more than one terrain. I don't necessarily need a ready-made tiling and streaming system, but the API and the editor should be able to handle more than one terrain per scene

 

- vegetation and object placement. Personally, I will mostly be procedurally place trees, grass, objects etc, so I don't heavily need a terrain painting feature in the editor. Again, the means to place those things via an API or alpha textures would be important for me.

 

- set terrain extensions in the editor (m per pixel, maximum height). If I remember correctly, LE2 had a limit of vertical height of 2000m, at least in the editor)

 

- use externally generated textures (base color, normal map, splat maps)

 

- if possible: define roads/rivers.LE2, you could define e.g. roads using road nodes. Again, doing that via an API would be great

 

- what is planned in the direction of billboarding/impostors/LOD etc. to allow for large amounts of vegetation etc.?

[AggrorJorn]

Josh said he would make a blog about the terrain development soon.

[Josh]

- more than one terrain. I don't necessarily need a ready-made tiling and streaming system, but the API and the editor should be able to handle more than one terrain per scene

What problem does this solve?

[Rastar]

I am working on a road cycling game where you cover 50-200km per race (read: scene). For that I need to dynamically load terrain tiles, and more than one will be visible at a time.

 

If there is another , easier way to do that, I'd love to know!

[MikeClarke]

terrain patching is quite nice, especially if we can make smaller chunks and just connect them together at the seem's smooth out any difference. Also helps cut areas' for building foundations we intend to add later - their are many a work around for this,but it is a nice feature to have.

[YouGroove]

If there is another , easier way to do that, I'd love to know!

Is it offroad racing ?

50-200km : will it won't be boring for players ? 10 minutes to finish a lap ?

I would say make racing circuit shorter.

[AggrorJorn]

If you make a game like cycling manager (tour de france, la vuelta) then you need long tracks. Sometimes races are 30 minutes.

[Rastar]

It's actually even more esoteric than that... :-) It's more a fitness app than a game, where people use an indoor cycling trainer to ride (real-life) courses. Yes, that actually *is* boring, but the idea is to make indoor cycling less boring than before. Yes, maybe 200km might be a bit too large, because that would mean you do a complete Tour de France stage (thought I' wouldn't be surprised if there are some freaks who might do that...), but 30-50km would be a rather normal training session.

 

I know this isn't your standard use case, but with larger landscapes becoming more common these days I think it is a feature that other Leadwerks games might be using as well.

[ZioRed]

I know this isn't your standard use case, but with larger landscapes becoming more common these days I think it is a feature that other Leadwerks games might be using as well.

More than multiple terrains (that I personally don't find a usual way), it's probably more common to have a function to load a scene additive besides the current Map::Load (that is without clearing the current one, but "adding" the new scene "into" so in the editor in the 2nd scene you set the position of the terrain where the previous scene terrain ends).

[MikeClarke]

May be silly a silly question...could we extrude shapes from the terrain mesh in the actual level editor.

 

Just think say I may a 3 square mile location, then I have a center section for a town, could I create brushes and use csg extract to remove the shape from the terrain so I have a hole to place a building in without risking the floor surface intruding through the living room floor.

[beo6]

removing parts of the terrain was already possible in LE2

so i would think that it will make a comeback in Leadwerks 3

[Rastar]

On a second thought, at least for my use case something like a Chunked LOD system might actually be better. E.g. while driving along a mountain side or passing the top you will have a pretty far view, but I only need detailed terrain clode to the roads. And since the player is confined to the roads, many of the tiles on the hierarchical LOD tree could be pruned in advance.

 

Even though most of the implementation details required for that are new to me, I might give it a try (if only because it's interesting and fun). Now the question is: Would I be able to integrate this homebrew terrain with the rest of Leadwerks? In the sense that my classes provide the terrain mesh while the rest like texturing etc. would be standard Leadwerks?

 

A very vague question, I know, but maybe there is already a simple answer.