Four problems with atlas 2
by Afrim Kacaj · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 09/12/2006 (11:36 am) · 21 replies
Problem 1: RGB is swapped to BGR, this is a small problem when you generage 1 huge terrain texture file since it can be easily swapped in photoshop. But it is a huge problem when there are 256 tiled images to change.
Problem 2: I can not use a tile bigger then 256px, engine crashes on load. I have a Radeon X800 pro video card.
Problem 3: For the life of me I can not get a high quality terrain in atlas 2. I generated a 8k by 8k texture with a 1k by 1k 1 meter spacing height map. It looks excelent in the L3DT viewer but looks like crap and pixelated in TSE. This is probably related to problem number two above.
Problem 4: What happened to anisotropic filtering? Terrain looks very blurry when viewed in perspective.
Problem 2: I can not use a tile bigger then 256px, engine crashes on load. I have a Radeon X800 pro video card.
Problem 3: For the life of me I can not get a high quality terrain in atlas 2. I generated a 8k by 8k texture with a 1k by 1k 1 meter spacing height map. It looks excelent in the L3DT viewer but looks like crap and pixelated in TSE. This is probably related to problem number two above.
Problem 4: What happened to anisotropic filtering? Terrain looks very blurry when viewed in perspective.
Associate Kyle Carter
@Afrim - No, the tree depth does not need to match anymore. As long as the geometry tree depth is within 2 or 3 of the texture tree depth it'll work just fine. Atlas does not use tiles anymore - it uses a clipmap implementation (similar to QuakeWars) that does not require a match anymore.
Also be aware that most of the warnings that Atlas spits out are just that - suggestions.
Getting a texel density of 512tx/meter is pretty high, even on today's hardware. That means that you'd have to have a 512k texture for your 1k terrain - which means you have to have a source data file that is, uncompressed, 768gb. Running it through JPEG might get you down to a mere 76gb, but that's still a lot of data to ship to your users, and a lot of data to be streaming around. Moving the camera at a rate of 10m/sec (most FPS players run in this range) means you'd have to stream several megabytes of texture data every frame - even on PCX, that adds up fast.
All this said, you should have no problems getting an 8k texture onto a 1k terrain. With 256 px tiles, you'd have a texture tree depth of 5 for your texture Atlas file. This means you could run your geometry tree depth as low as 3 with no problems - each chunk being a sizable quarter of a square kilometer of terrain. You might want to bump the geometry tree depth up to 4 - this should cost you little to nothing in terms of performance, and give appreciably better performance.
If you're willing to target only PS2.0 or higher hardware, you can run your geometry completely independently of the texture data by rewriting a few parts of the clipmap rendering. However, this will cost you pretty heavily in performance, even on very high end graphics cards. (And on so-called high end cards like the X300, you'll get just miserable performance.)