T3D Terrain system
by MarkVince · in General Discussion · 01/19/2010 (8:53 am) · 5 replies
I've not used Torque3D yet. I've used Unity. Before buying a licence for Torque I need to know:
(i) How does the terrain system compare to Unity ?
( Particularly - how are trees, detail meshes, grass handled. Does it enable multiple terrains
to tile together as neighbors and so on.... )
(ii) How are shaders specified ? ( ie HLSL or what... )
(iii) Can I link in precompiled C++ object files and call them in the $100 version,
or do I need the $1000 version for this.
(iv) Can I import fbx files ?
(v) Does T3D support UDP comms ?
Cheers
Mark
(i) How does the terrain system compare to Unity ?
( Particularly - how are trees, detail meshes, grass handled. Does it enable multiple terrains
to tile together as neighbors and so on.... )
(ii) How are shaders specified ? ( ie HLSL or what... )
(iii) Can I link in precompiled C++ object files and call them in the $100 version,
or do I need the $1000 version for this.
(iv) Can I import fbx files ?
(v) Does T3D support UDP comms ?
Cheers
Mark
About the author
#2
2. HLSL for Windows, GLSL for Mac
3. You will need the $1000 version, though there are some who are interested in implementing linked DLLs.
4. The two supported format types are COLLADA (industry standard) and DTS (our proprietary format).
5. Yes. The networking is UDP based.
01/19/2010 (11:27 am)
1. Quite a bit more powerful than Unity. Trees are treated as brushes, and can be painted on to create massive forests. Detail meshes use your expected LOD system. Grass can be handled via the GroundCover system, which procedurally generates billboards or shapes based on the terrain material (grass, sand, etc).2. HLSL for Windows, GLSL for Mac
3. You will need the $1000 version, though there are some who are interested in implementing linked DLLs.
4. The two supported format types are COLLADA (industry standard) and DTS (our proprietary format).
5. Yes. The networking is UDP based.
#3
01/19/2010 (6:51 pm)
you can also download the demo to try out T3D there is no time limit on the demo but there is a limit of how many objects you can put in the demo. 
#4
There are plans to support automatic tiling in a future release.
01/20/2010 (12:18 am)
Quote:Does it enable multiple terrainsThere is no automatic system for tiling terrains together as of Torque 3D 1.1, but you can freely place terrains side by side if you want.
to tile together as neighbors and so on....
There are plans to support automatic tiling in a future release.
#5
01/20/2010 (5:27 am)
Wow. Thanks for the all the info. very helpful. It seems that T3D is probably a better choice for what I want.... I'll have a look at the demo. 
Associate Jaimi McEntire
King of Flapjacks
1. The terrain system is nicer than the one in unity, in my opinion. The terrain can have shaders, bump maps, and different textures for close and far. It looks more realistic. The trees, grass, rocks (etc) can be placed as regular (static) meshes individually, or can be placed with replicators in a certain area, or can be placed automatically based on terrain, or you can use the newer forest object to manage them. You can have multiple terrains.
2. Shaders are in HLSL.
3. No, I believe you can only do that in the Pro version in 1.0. I'm not sure if they're adding the ability to expose DLL functions to scripting in the 1.1 version or not.
4. You would need to convert the FBX to DAE format.
5. T3D has an awesome network engine internally. I know that TCP and HTTP are both usable via scripting, but not sure about UDP.