Game Development Community

What causes this prob in a terrain?

by Dave · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 09/24/2006 (5:10 am) · 5 replies

Hi,

I get this in my terrains occasionally and can't figure out what is causing it.

[IMG]http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/3259/slotdn7.th.jpg[/IMG]

I'm guessing it's a combination of error metric and tree depth? Is there any kind of formula or guidance on how to combine these params if they are the cause? If not, is there another solution?

Also, how can I control LOD for my terrains? I'd like more detail in the distance as I have some pretty flat and open moorland in places. The LOD that I currently have shows too much tiling in the distance. (I don't want to restrict the view using fog or anything like that).

Thanks very much,

Dave.
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Torque Game Engine Advanced


Torque Owner Westy
#1
09/24/2006 (5:36 am)
I guess the best person to answer this would be Ben G.

Torque Owner Bobby Leighton
Imagn' Games
#2
09/24/2006 (12:10 pm)
Interesting....it looks as if there is some kind of clipping that is allowing you to see through the terrain mesh...Ive sen the LOD chunks in wire frame plenty and that definitely a piece of it sticking out...is it like that from a distance or is it happening only on close movements near the terrain...if it is only close up then i assume it may be related to the clipping plane of the character models i keep hearing about..I guess for shit and giggles until someone with a larger brain than myself can answer this you should try making that bounding box a little bigger on the player model if that doesn't work or it is happening no matter where you are on you maps. then i believe there is a way to adjust visual clipping for rendering I'm just not sure how or if that is your problem...is there anything more you can tell us about when this is happening?

Torque Owner Dave
#3
09/25/2006 (1:28 am)
Hi all,

It happens a long way away as well as close up. Sometimes (only sometimes) it disappears when you get close to it. It's always on a long gentle slope as far as I recall, although in earlier versions of TSE I've seen it in mountain sides as well. There's nothing else that seems to be common to it, just long slopes really. I think it happens less when you have a low error metric but that may be my imagination. That's why I was hoping someone knows which params might be affecting it.

Thanks,

Dave.

Associate Kyle Carter
#4
09/28/2006 (7:54 pm)
It's a minor error in the terrain skirt tesselation code. I'm working on a major rewrite of that portion of Atlas, but it's going slowly. The area to look for fixing it would be in the old atlas generator (don't remember class name off hand) where it is outputting skirts.

Torque Owner Dave
#5
09/29/2006 (4:14 am)
Hi Ben,

Thanks for that. Now I know what it is I think I can wait for your fix thanks. Not being a C programmer I wouldn't be able to tell my skirt from my tesselation.

I'll be getting into the code at some stage. I'm a pretty good Java programmer (blush) but every time I look at the mess of header and cpp files, pointers and memory alloc, and the general disorganisation of non-OO code I run as fast as I can in the other direction :-) I'm sure it's all as clear as a bell to someone who knows how these things are organised, but it scares the life out of me.

Cheers,

Dave.