Preventing Tile Repeating

#1 Good question ... anyone take a stab at this yet ?

#2 The terrain only draws out to the current max-visible distance. The repeating nature of the terrain does not really impose any processing overhead. If you want to draw less terrain, you could shorten the horizon. Is this what your talking about :)

#3 Speaking for myself, sort of. But when one gets to the edge of the terrian, the horizon has moved out farther, right ?

For example, if you have an island, and want to use as much of the available terrain tile as possible, when the player gets to the beach, the horizon will probably have moved far enough away, that the next mirror of the island is sitting there. Then players are gonna want to swim to it. You know people ... :)

Currently, I'm using the technique you describe, with a large enough ocean buffer so that you can't see the mirrors from the beach. But that reduces the space I have on the terrain for the land, and I would like to use as much of it as I possibly could.

#4 You could also go the other way and use a crater. If the sides are steep enough then it will not be climbable. And you can get some really cool crater effects using photoshop and a greyscale heightmap with a spray paintbrush.

#5 Oh yeah, just thought of another issue - not exactly the same, but probably closely related. The repeating water block tiles prevent me from having more than one kind of water, otherwise I get water floating in the air somewhere else.

The crater idea is a good one, but unfortunately, I'm modeling an actual place, and it isn't laid out that way.

#6 Well, I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to remove the repeating on both the terrain and the water. But I can't give a simple one line solution :( You'd have to look through the code and see how the repeating is handled. If you actually want to extend the terrain/water to cover much larger non-repeating areas, that's a little more work, something a lot of people on the forums have talked about doing though.

If you want to just leave the center square, a simple hack may be to have the terrain return a 0 height for all repeating squares. If you let the water repeat, then you could build a island as large as the center terrain block.

#7 Hi,

For our usage (I posted the original thread message), we decided to go with distance fog and/or steep walls around the play area to keep the player within the confined area.
This works ok for us.

David

#8 got another question here. i see, that shadows on the terrain are also "tiled" with the terrain. is there a way to stop this. this is really stupid, when you place a building somewhere and a few steps later, there's just the shadow of it.
any idea?