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GTA like islands\terrain

by Bardur Mikladal · in Artist Corner · 05/14/2006 (3:16 am) · 9 replies

Hi..

i am working on a GTA (grand theft auto) like game and i have been wondering (and searching alot) about the terrain\Island question..

basicly i want to make seperate islands with portals in eg. a brigde or tunnle to the next islands...
But How would i go about making these GTA like islands Like This!:

first off... i know TGE has a 2km x 2km terrain bountary.. and if i made the terrain in TGE i would have a "Very" hard time aligning the roads and other stuff to the surface.. plus i guess the islands will be bigger then 2km... (but ill look more into that)

So tell me whats the best solution? :

To make the terrain in TGE and make the roads in peaces so i can "stitch" them up in TGE... (but here i can only have like 2km terrain.. right?)

OR to make the island as a DIF, in wich i can then align the roads in my 3D software (3Ds Max 8)
and the terrain would (imo) would work better.. but then its the texture question...
(in theory this should give me a bigger terrain.. and make the whole creation easier.. thinking about the roads..)

what would be the preffered method? or is there EVEN a better one?
(im farly new to TGE...so)

Regards
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Torque Owner Stefan Lundmark
#1
05/14/2006 (3:21 am)
How about we post in one area?

Torque Owner Bardur Mikladal
#2
05/14/2006 (3:27 am)
So.. there!.. i deleted the one in the private section..
And sorry if i offendet anyone

Regards

Associate Joseph Euan
#3
05/14/2006 (3:29 am)
Quote:To make the terrain in TGE and make the roads in peaces so i can "stitch" them up in TGE... (but here i can only have like 2km terrain.. right?)
You could make all your models a lot smalerl, which would mean the terrain is larger.
Or you could use TSE which has unlimited terrain sizes.


Quote:OR to make the island as a DIF, in wich i can then align the roads in my 3D software (3Ds Max 8)
and the terrain would (imo) would work better.. but then its the texture question...
(in theory this should give me a bigger terrain.. and make the whole creation easier.. thinking about the roads..)
I think making the whole island one .dif, would really hit the games performance.
Aligning roads isn't really hard....

Torque Owner Bardur Mikladal
#4
05/14/2006 (3:49 am)
I have been thingking off TSE... but.. this is more like a "fun" project.. so TSE is "kinda" not really what i want now... already used alot of cash on TGE books, TLK & TGE plus other related stuff..

simply.. What would be the best way?..

i know i can scale the character.. but wouldnt i "screw" the mesurements... when making objects and accessories... meaning i would then have to scale every single one of the objects..?

how could i align the roads easily?

Hakan Yuksel
#5
05/15/2006 (8:07 am)
Hello,

I will have the same problem in a few weeks. I was thinking about starting a thread about this but I better ask my questions here. How do you align 2 seperate terrain, and how do you make it seamless.

Torque Owner Martin Schultz
#6
05/15/2006 (8:55 am)
Well, I would suggest starting with the "small" TGE terrain. Even filling a 4x4 square kilometer terrain with a city is a huge bunch of work and takes up a lot of time. I did it once using square ground DIF's and it worked out more or less good.

Torque 3D Owner Sean H.
#7
05/15/2006 (10:06 am)
If I were going to do something like this, I would make each island a separate "mission". The island would be terrain with surrounding water and dif structures. When a person travels to a different island, a loading screen pops up(like the original GTA 3) and the new board is loaded. If I had to have multiple islands loaded on the same map, I would do the same thing and just scale everything down a bit. The main problem with doing it this way is that terrain textures will look stretched and terrain heightmap spacing would be so large that terrain would look flat and blocky. you could still workaround this with judicious use of dif objects to add landscape detail, but if you want really detailed islands I would suggest just making each one a separate mission.

Torque Owner Bardur Mikladal
#8
05/15/2006 (11:58 am)
@Sean H.

Thats exactly what i am gonna do.. eg. each island is its own mission..

But how should\could i: Align the roads to the terrain... note.. theres gonna be alot of roads.. is there a "simple" great way to align them in TGE?

and how about having bigger terrain... without scaling the objects and characters..

Regards
Bardur

Hakan Yuksel
#9
05/16/2006 (2:13 am)
I need to know if its possible to align 2 terrain side by side seamlessly, is it possible?