Some Quick Questions..

#1 I heard that Atlas is no longer being used at all? I don't know what is replacing it, but I would also be interested to know if there is a program we could use to generate nice looking terrain, rather than having to build it manually in the editor, or create a heightfield in a graphics package, every time.

#2 I guess we will see an expended MegaTerrain system or a blend between atlas and MegaTerrains.
Flexibility of MegaTerrains but potentially a few of the clip map optimizations and power of Atlas.

What I am really looking forward is the per texture detail texture :)

#3 Any new projects in the works Lateral? It was too bad that TIG Toronto died. It would have been fun to see your progress.

#4 not much new here. I dont know if Ken Finney has kept it alive or not.

#5 About the terrain: I think Tom Spilman is working on a new system that is going to replace current solutions. It is promising to be fast and editable from within the world editor. So I guess its taking the good sides of every terrain solution TGEA has.

#6 Ken works at Durham College now. He probably has a special interest night in Oshawa.

#7 @Konrad: Correct, his solution is fast, editable, and very scalable. In a lot of ways you can get the texel definition you want, high or low (depending on your game requirements). You can pack a 1024 x 1024, 2048 x 2048 (or larger) terrain texture into more or less whatever size terrain you want (within some bounds of course).

That's what has me most excited about Tom's terrain work, it's incredibly scalable so should work for a lot of different cases.

#8 That sounds very promising

#9 Cant wait to see the docs on terrain features.

#10 I would seriously reccommend looking at Grome
It is a full on suite of terrain creation and texturing tools and comes with source code,Its not too cheap but worth every dollar and they already have Atlas terrain plug-ins, and have stated that they will write new plug-ins for Torque 3d
Also for creating heightmaps you cannot beat GeoControl2 for power and realism we usually create terrain in Geocontrol save out .Raw ,import into Grome ,define cells or quads for pageing and then export to Torque
We tried everything out there for yeras and this pipeline works and works well

#11 I agree with Richard on Grome. I've worked with a lot of editors over the years, and its been by far my favorite. The layering and procedural systems are top notch and it can export into a heightmap for importing into the engine. With the new terrain, assuming it can import a raw, bmp, png or whatever heightmap you could do the bulk of your terrain design in Grome, import it into Torque and then tweak where necessary and texture.

#12 Just as a note, the new terrain system will have editors similar to those of the legacy terrain, so unlike atlas there will be real-time editing.

#13 Ok thanks for all that info on the terrains, now that just leaves the other 3 questions :)

#14

Quote:Whats a DataBlock Editor? Somethign similar to the Plastic Games Tweaker?

It's a simple editor that will allow you to change the values of Datablocks while in the World Editor (at real-time)... It also handles saving out the the file (in the proper location as to attempt to best not stomp your scripts and comments).

Quote:What's Torque's Live Asset Update? That's new.

If you change an asset you can see it update live in the editor (not having to re-load the engine each time). Our internal artists like us a lot better with this :)

#15 Any updates on the shader question? Will there be a tool set in T3D to support custom materials or edit materials?

#16 There is a Material Editor that allows you to edit Torque Materials (powered by ShaderGen). It likely won't have direct support for CustomMaterial's by the time we release.

#17 @Matt

Heck even your external artists no longer want to throw you guys under a bus because we have to reload the app every time we want to test/tweak something, the system is incredibly awesome and a big thank you to GargeGames for doing this :)

#18 I know for one our artists will be eternally thankful for this one... I've been bugged by a couple of them to see if I could write one for them.

#19 Quick note on terrain... we're taking care to make sure we have good support for importing/exporting terrain heightfields and opacity maps. The hope is that you should easily be able to have round trip sort of workflow between Torque 3D and 3rd party terrain tools.

#20 New Terrain, new lighting, real-time results from editing and tweaking art, Material Editor, Road and River tools... -- working with Torque has definitely gotten easier and better!