One large world limitation?
by Shawn Hyde · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 12/14/2006 (1:35 pm) · 23 replies
Is there a way to do one large world with TSE, no zoning just one large world? I see that atlas has a limitation on size so how would that work. I'm looking for a world solution that works like lineage2 without having to do an overhaul on the code.
#22
If you use a tile size of 4 meters, and had high resolution (1024x768 for example) terrain tiles, you could have a nice looking terrain that is 16x16 km. Star Wars Galaxies planets were only 8x8 km I believe. So that's a pretty good sized space. If you split it up into continents you could obviously have a very large world.
You'd still want to probably do some other atlas modifications though. The lack of detail textures or normal maps really hurts the terrains visual appeal. That's not an easy one to fix either, I've had a lot of problems with it. The other problem is that if you wanted to use stock Atlas, you'd either have to use unique terrain (which would look blocky in a world this size or would not process through) or blended terrain. The current blended terrain only allows for 4 tiles, which is fine if your doing Star Wars Galaxies style planets where the whole planet looks pretty similar, but if you want to design a world like the earth, then you don't have enough tiles to work with. Doubling that isn't too hard to do, thankfully.
12/21/2006 (10:08 pm)
If you can hand modify your heightfields, I'd make sure that there are small areas, and not large areas to cross the seams into zones if you can. Either by separating things with multiple continents and water in between, or by giving a narrow winding passageway in between areas. You could then use the narrow winding arrow as the buffer zone in between the two zones. It will stall them while you can re-route them to the other server behind the scenes. Torque isn't really set up for that type of thing though so you'd have to rewrite a lot of the mission loading code to allow players to be switched quickly on the two and to then load the lighting and objects on the fly. Finally the buffer region would have to communicate items on each side of it to one another, so that you can see whats standing on the other side. If you use a tile size of 4 meters, and had high resolution (1024x768 for example) terrain tiles, you could have a nice looking terrain that is 16x16 km. Star Wars Galaxies planets were only 8x8 km I believe. So that's a pretty good sized space. If you split it up into continents you could obviously have a very large world.
You'd still want to probably do some other atlas modifications though. The lack of detail textures or normal maps really hurts the terrains visual appeal. That's not an easy one to fix either, I've had a lot of problems with it. The other problem is that if you wanted to use stock Atlas, you'd either have to use unique terrain (which would look blocky in a world this size or would not process through) or blended terrain. The current blended terrain only allows for 4 tiles, which is fine if your doing Star Wars Galaxies style planets where the whole planet looks pretty similar, but if you want to design a world like the earth, then you don't have enough tiles to work with. Doubling that isn't too hard to do, thankfully.
#23
12/22/2006 (11:36 am)
I'll probably be hiring someone to edit the base code and tools before Q3 of next year, depending on what TSE is looking like in a few months. 
Torque Owner Shawn Hyde