How to create a massive map
by Andy Holmes · in Artist Corner · 09/19/2008 (6:23 pm) · 3 replies
Ive been trying to figure out the last few days ways to go about making a massive size map in the out of teh box version of TGEA
my question is how.
here is what i have tryed
after 2 mega terrains the game crashes
after 7 terrain blocks the game crashes
so how do i make i huge terrain say of size 15x7 of 64 size terrain blocks or this equivalent size for the world if not bigger
im not sure what atlas does yet so if someone can also tell me how to use it that would be great also sorry new at this so i apologize for being a noob
my question is how.
here is what i have tryed
after 2 mega terrains the game crashes
after 7 terrain blocks the game crashes
so how do i make i huge terrain say of size 15x7 of 64 size terrain blocks or this equivalent size for the world if not bigger
im not sure what atlas does yet so if someone can also tell me how to use it that would be great also sorry new at this so i apologize for being a noob
#2
09/20/2008 (8:54 am)
My video card suports up to 2 GB of RAM on its own i dought that its the video card then i have a Nvidia GeFOrce Go 7950 GTX 
#3
The Approx. Available VRAM is how much video ram TGEA thinks your card has.
If this is being reported incorrectly then you may have a driver/configuration problem.
If this seems fine then try creating your mega terrains in stages.
Create one then save the map then create another map and save until it crashes.
Then reload your mission and you should have all the maps from before the crash. Now try to add another mega terrain and see if that works.
The reason I suggest this is I had to do this with my laptop because it's GPU has only 256 megs.
It seems that the mega terrain importer "may" have a memory leak.
My laptop is capable of have 3 mega terrain without crashing but I can't create them at one time using the importer without it crashing.
09/20/2008 (9:39 am)
Andy can you open your console.log file and look for something similar to thisTexture Manager - Approx. Available VRAM: 515899392 - Threshold VRAM: 67108864 - Quality mode: high % - Initialized Common
The Approx. Available VRAM is how much video ram TGEA thinks your card has.
If this is being reported incorrectly then you may have a driver/configuration problem.
If this seems fine then try creating your mega terrains in stages.
Create one then save the map then create another map and save until it crashes.
Then reload your mission and you should have all the maps from before the crash. Now try to add another mega terrain and see if that works.
The reason I suggest this is I had to do this with my laptop because it's GPU has only 256 megs.
It seems that the mega terrain importer "may" have a memory leak.
My laptop is capable of have 3 mega terrain without crashing but I can't create them at one time using the importer without it crashing.
Torque Owner Bill Vee
DayOfWar Studios
It may seem difficult at first but L3DT can do most of the heavy lifting.
I would bet that the crash you are getting is your video card running out of texture memory for your terrains clipmap. Depending on your card it can consume about 26 megs of video memory per 1024 clipmap texture.
7 terrains at 26 megs per terrain will grab about 182 megs of video memory , add one more 26 meg clipmap and add the other memory already reserved for your other textures and even a 256 meg card will run out of resources.
Fortunately the atlas terrain has the advantage of no matter how big the terrain gets it only needs 1 clipmap and the LOD geometry is paged in and out as needed.
One draw back to atlas is that the collision geometry must be completely loaded into memory and is not paged like the LOD's are.