Terrain capability questions before buying
by Jon Bauman · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 01/04/2006 (10:36 am) · 6 replies
My company recently purchased the commercial version of TGE, and subsequently realized that the terrain size limitation is a problem. Atlas looks like the solution, so we're planning to upgrade to TSE, but before we do, I want to make sure it will be sufficient.
The area we're looking to model is on the order of 250 miles on a side, and we'll be using 30 meter resolution height data for a total of around 200 million data points. This is not a typical game; the user's perspective will be from the sky overlooking the entire terrain.
1. Can atlas handle this magnitude of data?
2. I understand Atas uses one large texture to paint the entire terrain. Is LOD suppported for zooming?
3. How would one go about importing this huge number of height and texture data?
Another question that may or may not be related to Atlas: We'd like to be able to toggle terrain overlays that label features (cities, rivers, etc.) a la Google Earth. Is this easily accomplished?
Finally, with both the TSE Demo and the full version of TGE, the mouse control gets weird and jerky in DirectX mode. It seems to be fine in OpenGL, but GL isn't supported for TSE yet. Is this a know problem or some sort of misconfiguration on my part?
The area we're looking to model is on the order of 250 miles on a side, and we'll be using 30 meter resolution height data for a total of around 200 million data points. This is not a typical game; the user's perspective will be from the sky overlooking the entire terrain.
1. Can atlas handle this magnitude of data?
2. I understand Atas uses one large texture to paint the entire terrain. Is LOD suppported for zooming?
3. How would one go about importing this huge number of height and texture data?
Another question that may or may not be related to Atlas: We'd like to be able to toggle terrain overlays that label features (cities, rivers, etc.) a la Google Earth. Is this easily accomplished?
Finally, with both the TSE Demo and the full version of TGE, the mouse control gets weird and jerky in DirectX mode. It seems to be fine in OpenGL, but GL isn't supported for TSE yet. Is this a know problem or some sort of misconfiguration on my part?
#2
01/08/2006 (2:01 am)
(If you have a slow GPU, or are running in a power-saving mode, or sometimes in a window, the driver will render frames that lag behind the latest, meaning the mouse will get weird and jerky. Going fullscreen, plugging into a wall, or the like tends to fix the problem.)
#3
Any ideas about how to do overlays?
01/09/2006 (7:16 am)
Ben, thanks for the reply. Strangely enough, this is on a desktop (so no power-saving mode) and the GPU is decent (Radeon X600, 128MB). Things do seem to be better when I go into fullscreen. Incidentally, after returning from fullscreen the windowed version seems better as well.Any ideas about how to do overlays?
#4
05/12/2006 (1:44 am)
I think I know what you're talking about. Atleast the mouse part. It's DirectX's "prerendering of frames" that causes it. The symptome is called (atleast around my people) "Gummimus" (Swedish for rubbermouse) and I'd say it reminds med of trying to control the pointer by dragging it around with a rubberband. Am I close?
#6
I hate rubbermouse, with a passion. So I'm as interested as you are in getting rid of it. ;)
Oh, btw. About the one big texture for the terrain; It's the new hype in game development. Search for "mega texturing" on google. You'll find tons of stuff. But it's not that big of a deal I think. It's cool though. See if you can find the clip with john carmack talking about quake wars (which will feature mega texturing).
05/12/2006 (3:05 pm)
Haven't had the chance to test this, but if you search for "prerender" in [...\Torque\SDK\engine\game\main.cc] there is something going on there.I hate rubbermouse, with a passion. So I'm as interested as you are in getting rid of it. ;)
Oh, btw. About the one big texture for the terrain; It's the new hype in game development. Search for "mega texturing" on google. You'll find tons of stuff. But it's not that big of a deal I think. It's cool though. See if you can find the clip with john carmack talking about quake wars (which will feature mega texturing).
Torque Owner Stefan Lundmark
Atlas can handle as much as your system can handle, I guess. It will swap data in and out and keep only the relevant info in memory.
I think so, yes.
GarageGames ships TSE EA with some simple tools that will let you convert heightmaps into the chunk datatype of which TSE uses. This means you can use Terragen or whatever you to import into TSE.
I've had no trouble at all with controlling mice in TGE.