My return to what I love most: Terrain
by Jacob Dankovchik · in Torque 3D Professional · 05/06/2009 (1:10 pm) · 82 replies
For the longest time I've been completely out of the GG community. Truth be told, after TGEA, which I considered a total flop, I had completely lost faith. With the comming of this new engine, I decided to give GG one last shot.
My biggest thing back in the day was particle effects, and terrain. I would spend hours on end playing with Atlas, making terrain after another. Mostly I'm waiting for the soft particles to make it in before I tear into those. So for now, I'm playing with terrains, and this is the result of about.. 1 day of playing.
First off, I'd like to mention the lighting. While it appears to be great at a small scale, when you scale the terrains up, it starts getting very ugly. Tweak some settings and it gets better, sometimes much better. Basically, some nice default values are going to have to be found and a good, all-inclusive menu for easily changing all settings. But, as many as there are, it would still be good to have default access to all of them, such as through an Advanced Settings menu. In other words, there's a lot of numbers to tweak, but that's a good thing because you get a lot of control.
There seems to be some inevitable lose of shadow accuracy as size goes up, which concerns me a bit, but I'll worry about that more at a later date, if it's in any way an issue.
I'd like to state that the realtime tools is a MASSIVE plus. Being able to cook up a beautiful heightmap in L3DT and then further changing it in-game is such a wonderful step for me.
One thing that I found which concerned me a bit was the height limit of 2047. While some may find this to be enough, I simply don't. :P All my time with Atlas, I did nothing but push the limits with it, as I'm doing with this new setup and honestly 2047 meters just isn't enough. For some people who are trying to make a beautiful set of mountains, it's just too small. Perhaps this is something easily fixed/changed, I'm not sure yet as I've no way to mess with source on this comp yet. But just pointing it out.
Basically, I think there is a LOT of potential in the terrain system and I'd certainly like to see some of the other people here get in on it as well. :D
Since I've just barely begun touching on the terrain, I haven't taken the time to really work with texturing yet. That's the next step for me. But here are a few shots of what I've thrown together right away. Max height is 550m, 4096x4096 in area. Had to tweak a few settings to get it to something I can find acceptable.
My biggest thing back in the day was particle effects, and terrain. I would spend hours on end playing with Atlas, making terrain after another. Mostly I'm waiting for the soft particles to make it in before I tear into those. So for now, I'm playing with terrains, and this is the result of about.. 1 day of playing.
First off, I'd like to mention the lighting. While it appears to be great at a small scale, when you scale the terrains up, it starts getting very ugly. Tweak some settings and it gets better, sometimes much better. Basically, some nice default values are going to have to be found and a good, all-inclusive menu for easily changing all settings. But, as many as there are, it would still be good to have default access to all of them, such as through an Advanced Settings menu. In other words, there's a lot of numbers to tweak, but that's a good thing because you get a lot of control.
There seems to be some inevitable lose of shadow accuracy as size goes up, which concerns me a bit, but I'll worry about that more at a later date, if it's in any way an issue.
I'd like to state that the realtime tools is a MASSIVE plus. Being able to cook up a beautiful heightmap in L3DT and then further changing it in-game is such a wonderful step for me.
One thing that I found which concerned me a bit was the height limit of 2047. While some may find this to be enough, I simply don't. :P All my time with Atlas, I did nothing but push the limits with it, as I'm doing with this new setup and honestly 2047 meters just isn't enough. For some people who are trying to make a beautiful set of mountains, it's just too small. Perhaps this is something easily fixed/changed, I'm not sure yet as I've no way to mess with source on this comp yet. But just pointing it out.
Basically, I think there is a LOT of potential in the terrain system and I'd certainly like to see some of the other people here get in on it as well. :D
Since I've just barely begun touching on the terrain, I haven't taken the time to really work with texturing yet. That's the next step for me. But here are a few shots of what I've thrown together right away. Max height is 550m, 4096x4096 in area. Had to tweak a few settings to get it to something I can find acceptable.
About the author
#82
I don't know what the limiting factor would be for you and your team but I can't see it being time or money. And I haven't tried it but I believe L3DT has the ability to allow one to create a huge map and then save it out as smaller tileable pieces.
The way I see it T3D is a 'game engine', which may have some modeling app features etc., but if one wants to save time and have something that looks its best one needs 3rd party tools like a good modeling app, a good terrain generator etc. etc...
05/20/2009 (9:21 am)
Quote:Project wise, its not imaginable for us to use 3rd party heightmap software, also, since we (me and my team) will expand the current system to include terrain paging for our project, and therefor have to use internal terrain editor to paint over edges ect (to not make seem's and such).
I don't know what the limiting factor would be for you and your team but I can't see it being time or money. And I haven't tried it but I believe L3DT has the ability to allow one to create a huge map and then save it out as smaller tileable pieces.
The way I see it T3D is a 'game engine', which may have some modeling app features etc., but if one wants to save time and have something that looks its best one needs 3rd party tools like a good modeling app, a good terrain generator etc. etc...
Torque 3D Owner Bo Bjering
No, i dont expect modelling tools in the engine, did i ever say that ?.
I do expect the terrain editor works and can do good smooth terrain (in a engine at this cost) and because its part of the engine.
Ive seen 99$ (and some more expensive) engines (though not as high rendering tech as this engine) and they had way better terrain sculpting then Torque3D at this point.
While i DO have a Grome pro license, using L3DT or not is not the issue, the issue is, my intire TEAM needs to license Grome aswell, as we cant have 10 different terrains (quality wise ect).
Thats why i EXPECT terrain editor in the engine we buy to actually make good looking terrains, as its ment to be uniform for our project and im not gonna sit and hack'n'slash some terrain in some 3rd party software, especially when me and my team have to make hundreds.
Project wise, its not imaginable for us to use 3rd party heightmap software, also, since we (me and my team) will expand the current system to include terrain paging for our project, and therefor have to use internal terrain editor to paint over edges ect (to not make seem's and such).
While, i do know James wrote some things he added to be added, ill wait commenting more on this, as right now its impossible for me to explain this, or most of you guys dont really care what quality you are doing (for what ever reason that might be) maybe you aint really making games, just content or something, wich is fine of course.
Ill stop commenting on this until final release i guess, since some of my issue COULD be releated to bugs and or missing things like bad LOD scaling in edit mode (no automatic distance LOD 1-8 errorSettingthing scaling ?), bad terrain rendering code (currently at setting 1 in LOD my GTX295 is doing 10 FPS on 2048x2048 HM at 0.125 squaresize where it should do like 500+ fps, its a empty scene after all, flat terrain, no objects) or missing features, or whatever, so no reason to continue to complain and just wait it out i guess.