TGE 1.5 Terrain size

#1 It will go down is you make the squaresize smaller. Its alot like DPI for images. But your basicly packing in more polygons in the terrain, by making them wholely smaller, thus making the size of the terrain that much smaller also (The bounds of it, W x L)

In turn, making it larger than 8, you would stretch out the concentration of polys, and in turn making the "size" of your terrain, bigger.

#2 Umm. you stated the obvious buddy. i'm asking whats the unit size. like 256 units by 256. which was the origianal units. No matter how much you scale it down to. the units stay the same. my question is. how many units by units is the new terrain size.

#3 I don't understand, i answered your question. The textures used are still 25 x 256, the compression of the terrain increases the fidelity of the textures, because the textures is per-poly. So decreasing the terrain size increases the texture resolution.

I have no idea what you mean by "unit" size. And you never asked a specific question.

#4 Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm a Torque beginner:

I believe another way of asking the question is, how big of heightfield map can you use. And I believe the answer is that this is unchanged and is still 256x256. As an empirical test, I attempted to import a 512x512 heightmap and it only read in the top left 256x256 of the bitmap.

I too would like to see bigger map size because I'm trying to duplicate a BF1942(wake) and it's heightmap is 512x512, so I have to reduce it by half and it is not as detailed as the actual map.

#5 You are still limited to 256 x 256 with TGE 1.5.

If you want to use larger terrains you need to look into TGE Advanced (TSE).

#6 One of the biggest parts of me upgrading to TGE 1.5, it was said it will have larger terrain size. and, no i got TSE already. but i'm not going to port my game over to that just so i can use the atlas terrain. TSE/ TGE:A is still D3D. so its no good to me.

BTW. i just read more detail on what TGE 1.5 has to offer. i have miss read it. thinking they have increased the size of the terrain. but i come to releaze GG said that they just increased the geometry block size, giving it more detail.

#7 Yes, hight maps are still 256 x 256.

#8

Quote:
One of the biggest parts of me upgrading to TGE 1.5, it was said it will have larger terrain size.

Where was this said?

#9 @Stephen Zepp
can you actually read my whole post???

Quote:BTW. i just read more detail on what TGE 1.5 has to offer. i have miss read it. thinking they have increased the size of the terrain. but i come to releaze GG said that they just increased the geometry block size, giving it more detail.

But i guess it was my fault for not being too clear. i stop writting my post half way through to find the quote. then added the BTW part. so probably causing confusion.

#10 You initially stated you were looking for a way to make the detail look better and achieve a larger terrain by increasing the scale. Technically, one should have nothing to do with the other.

I'm new to Torque, so maybe they don't support this, but I'd think they have to. The quality of the texturing should be based on the amount of tiling you perform. You normally don't stretch one texture over the entire terrain, that'll never look good. Instead you blend multiple textures to get your affect, and each texture should be tiled so you gain the detail you want. Now if the texture doesn't tile well you'll see seams, but that can be managed either via a good artist and/or blurring the distant terrain which is what happens in real life anyway.

#11 Laurence - unfortunately one does has to do with the other.

The terrain seems to be hard coded, you can't choose how much to tile a texture before painting it, you cant rotate it either. However, there is a way to make the textures look not so blurred (although still a bit blurred sadly) and thats by shrinking the terrain (hence the guys question relating to both texture and terrain size). The added benefit of shrinking the terrain is its more detailed not only from texture but also there are more polygons in an area than before.

#12 How hard would it be to actually change the texture scale? Say... have it render 4 or 8 tiled textures instead of 1 per square?

#13 I don't think you can do that, and you can't double the size of the texture either, but there is a simple trick that can get you marginally better terrain.

Double the resolution of the texture but keep it 256x256. All of the stock textures have huge pixels which can be shrunk easily. For example, put the patchy.png texture in a photo editor and make a 2x2 tile (512x512) then shrink it back to 256x256. It really does work, and you might even be able to reduce it to a 3x3. Also, if you layer several textures on every given terrain square it will look less obviously fake.

#14 I am a TSE owner and that darn pic looks almost as good as 'drum roll please' TGEA! :0)