A question about world size.....

#1 I don't think there are any 'limits' to say... But it would really help if you told us what engine you were actually using. T3D, TGE, TGEA, TX3D, etc.

#2 I apologize, im testing the demo of T3D and was wondering if it was worth the investment of $1000. When I try to import a larger image file it crashes, I was just wondering if I spent time working with L3DT for a few months and refine the terrain, will it allow me to import larger tiled mosaic file.

My current terrain file will dwarf WOW and I already invested considerable time on the DEM. What I need to know to move forward is assurance that my efforts are not wasted. I dont mind starting small at all, and in fact I am sure I will be hard pressed to fill a 4km sq. in the beginning, but when I go to expand my borders I would like it to be an easy process, not a "OH SHIT, i gotta start over" moment

#3

Quote:My current terrain file will dwarf WOW

The question is- how do you fill all that with content? Do you have the ability and skills needed to manage such a team?

Quote:when I go to expand my borders I would like it to be an easy process

Even if you had the terrain ability, you're not going to find it easy. The thing is that you need to find a way to load and unload objects from the disk into the world. Zoning really is your friend here, even if the zone is just using a separate piece of the terrain. The more you throw at the environment, the more gets loaded into memory, and the fewer low-end machines you can play the game on.

As for the map dwarfing WoW... World of Warcraft did not base its success off of its map size, but rather its state of polish and consistency (not to mention a more than decade long history of polished games that brought many people over to the MMO from other genres). Such a statement is nice, but remember that Blizzard uses over 2000 servers to keep its game running, and that's partly due to real-estate (the zones, while looking seamless, are still managed by different servers, AFAIK).

You'll either have to zone your world, or implement your own streaming solution.

Also, if you want to know more about implementing MMOs, this is a very good thread. It's old, but I'll get around to updating it some day...

#4 yes ted I have read almost everything you have posted on discouraging such endeavors. I say it dwarves WOW is because the area of my TOTAL map is larger to start, I am not making it larger just to impress. I dont necessarily plan on developing an area that size, just I want to know what the limits are.

Quote: Even if you had the terrain ability, you're not going to find it easy. The thing is that you need to find a way to load and unload objects from the disk into the world. Zoning really is your friend here, even if the zone is just using a separate piece of the terrain.

Are you saying torque 3D has zoning or just telling me how I should build my own engine from scratch? and really i could care less about low end machines at this stage.

I am not a teenager and I have invested considerable effort thus far in learning many facets of game design and production. I am setting the groundwork so when I secure funding for the project, we have a clear direction. However before I invest in a game engine, I need to know it will do the job.

So again I ask, how large of of a world can I make with T3D? Assuming I want a scale of 1m, am I really limited to areas of 4096mx4096m?

#5 What Ted was trying to say is that terrain is only a very small part of seamless zoning and/or large worlds. You could use multiple terrain objects to make a world 100km by 100km if you really wanted to, but you would need to make some very large changes to the server system to handle enough objects for that terrain. The challenge with building very large worlds is not the terrain size, its the networking that has to manage all the objects in the world.

#6

Quote:yes ted I have read almost everything you have posted on discouraging such endeavors

Don't cop an attitude- if you scroll down you'll find almost a hundred links regarding everything from middleware to how to get more performance out of Torque engines. Oh, and there's discussions on steaming terrain as well. The thread is informative, not discouraging, unless you have better ideas on how people should make their MMOs.

Quote:I am not a teenager and I have invested considerable effort thus far in learning many facets of game design and production.

Neither am I, and I've spent years working on tech for my MMO. I can still fail, and so can you. That's what the thread is there for: To help. If you don't want help, then fine, but don't question the help given, or you can find yourself without it even when you ask.

Quote:So again I ask, how large of of a world can I make with T3D? Assuming I want a scale of 1m, am I really limited to areas of 4096mx4096m?

For a single terrain block, 4k x 4k is probably the limit, though you can modify the source if you're so inclined and able. If you want a seamless world, you'll need to modify the terrain code, collisions and movement code (because precision as you move outwards from the 0,0,0 center will drop as the errors of floating point accuracy become clearer), lighting/shadow code (you don't want shadows stretching for miles, you'll get no framerate), memory systems (to help load and unload both the bits of terrain to view as well as the objects and whatnot).

Remember, even WoW zones, in a few key ways.

#7 I am only concerned with building the models as I am far more proficient with 3d graphics than I am with code at this stage. Im not concerned because frankly writing code makes my brain melt, i tried and I fail at it.

When you said 'single terrain block' I had the idea that I could import more than one terrain block at a time, however that also crashed T3D. I have a fairly robust machine so I dont think it was a problem on my end.

Until I can find an experienced coder willing to dedicate time to my project (or until i get the $$$ to hire one), I guess I am limited, and its not the end of the world.

Thanks for your assistance Ted,

Dré

#8

Quote:When you said 'single terrain block' I had the idea that I could import more than one terrain block at a time, however that also crashed T3D. I have a fairly robust machine so I dont think it was a problem on my end.

I wonder if there is a bug with 4k x 4k sizes... I can import multiple heightfields with no problem. Here I imported 4 and inverted one or two of them (which I needed to run through anyway because I have a few subterrenean zones that will use the inverted-terrain technique):


Edit: I screwed with the textures, hence the "no material" material on one of the planes ;)

#9 I am still unsure whether I can go beyond 4k x 4k, however I tried stitching 2-2048 tiles and another problem arises, the terrain editing tools are unable to blend the 2 terrain blocks together. When you try to smooth the seam, the brush drops up or down to some random non existant terrain before jumping to the neighbouring tile, even when both tiles are selected.

#10 Hmmmmm... I loaded up two terrains and while trying to edit them I noticed that one would edit, and the other would try to mirror the edit when I clicked on it, but would always be off by a little bit in height. I should report that as a possible bug...

#11 4096 x 4096 is the largest single height map you can import directly into T3D. regardless of your square size, you are still limited to 4096 x 4096.

T3D also does not, as of now, officially support stitching multiple 4096 x 4096 blocks together -- you can try, but it is at your own risk. There are some forum posts about that, most notably by Fyodor "bank" Osokin

I suspect and hope that terrain is on the list of feature upgrades. Even Unity claims to have streaming/paged terrain and objects now. (I haven't seen it in action).

#12 I was really hoping the 'Export MegaTerrain to T3D'feature from the program L3DT from BundySoft would be supported by garagegames by now. I have a huge terrain map ready to populate and literally no way to import it.

Isnt L3dt a supported 3rd party program?

Quote:4096 x 4096 is the largest single height map you can import directly into T3D. regardless of your square size, you are still limited to 4096 x 4096.

Thats not exactly true either tho steve, my first attemp was a heightmap that was 4096x4096 and a tile size of 5, but at that resolution you couldnt add terrain features like rivers and cliffs, so useless for my purposes.

#13 Andre -- I feel your pain. Believe me, I do. Unfortunately, I don't have many answers for you. I do know somewhat of the limits of T3D, because I asked these questions myself and tested some things myself.

Everyone who asks about or wants huge terrains is always discouraged by others or asked why they need it...it is like a rite of passage. There is a good chance that the people who say large terrain isn't needed or how are you going to fill it up, etc are correct, but it can be a bit discouraging to hear that when you are just seeking an answer to a technical question.

If you can get past that and are still interested in T3D, I feel the current terrain system is pretty good, but I admit I am only comparing it to previous versions of Torque. I am also hopeful they will be adding features to it. One thing no one can complain about is the pace the Torque developers are setting in adding new features to T3D.

All that being said, here is the meager info I have to contribute to you:

I do believe that some of what you have tried and found to be impossible is NOT impossible:

I have exported 4096 x 4096 with squaresize of 10 (I did it again, just now, in 1.1alpha just to make sure) into T3D from L3DT. I then used various terrain tools on it to add mountains and lake beds. I then added a river. All went in with no problem. As far as cliffs, it depends on what you mean...if you want terrain with completely vertical edges (which basically looks like crap because the terrain texture gets way to stretched out) you can do that with the set height tool. There is also a Cliff Construction Kit coming out for T3D soon. search the torque forums for that if you are interested.

Therefore, I don't know what happened to you, but I believe you can add rivers/cliffs/terrain features to maps of 4096 x 4096.

I was told directly by the developers that 4096 x 4096 is the largest importable single height map. I was also told that you can use *any* square size you want, 10, 100, 1000, whatever. Of course as square size goes up the resolution goes down, but you might still be interested to play around with that. I never heard of anyone seriously going above 10 or 20, but I'm no expert.

When you say you used a tile size of 5, I am assuming you mean a squaresize of 5. You could, however, turn tiling on if you want your terrain to repeat infinitely, but I don't think that would do much for your situation.

L3DT is a supported program, but clearly not all features are supported in T3D. I have no idea if that new Export mega Terrain to T3D feature works or not, that would be good to know.

I believe Fyodor had like 9 or 16 terrains stitched together, his posts are definitely worth looking at. I don't understand how he overcame certain problems, but it might be worth checking out.

Lastly, for now, you can always implement huge terrains as zones. That is the approach I am taking until or if things change.

Wishing you all success, and happy thanksgiving!

Your Friend in Terrain despair,

Steve

P.S. I just noticed you are using T3D Demo, maybe thats why you had trouble adding terrain features to 4096 x 4096. I haven't done any testing with the demo at all, but I can't see why it would be different than the release version as far as terrain features, but who knows.

#14

Quote:I was told directly by the developers that 4096 x 4096 is the largest importable single height map. I was also told that you can use *any* square size you want, 10, 100, 1000, whatever. Of course as square size goes up the resolution goes down, but you might still be interested to play around with that. I never heard of anyone seriously going above 10 or 20, but I'm no expert

right square size is what people normally refer to as horizontal scale, the distance between points on a grid. So if I want to define the edge of a river I require at the very least 1m accuracy. If I was building a city or game that was built primarily around structures and models I would have no issue with this, however my plans are a vast wilderness based game.

#15 Hey Steve, yea Im talking with Aaron over at Bundysoft as well (I revived one of your threads actually). I would really love to be able to try out the 'Megaterrain' feature before my trial versions run out but I guess I am out of time and luck(and money cant forget about that stuff).

I hope Garage games adds some sort of 'Mini-Map' system as well, not so important for small tiles but if and when megaterrain gets added, it will be needed.

#16 As someone who has been where you are, ive managed to come to terms with the fact that a single huge seamless world is beyond me and my team, and in real terms is probably beyond most dev teams even here where ive seen some of the smartest people ive communicated with at least.

I'm pretty sure somebody will correct me, but the only engine i know of that supports massive terrains is the crytek stuff, and i dont even want to know what that would cost me in terms of real development, who knows, when i make my first million i'll buy a copy and i'll let you know :)

What i'm trying to say is that in real terms, pretty much every plan or design for both real world apps and games have to be hacked down to whats possible based on technology available, time available and budget available. people use milkshape instead of 3ds max knowing that you cannot do everything you want but at least its something.

Personally i hate WOW and everything its done to the game industry and particularly to the RPG sector of that industry and anything i say will no doubt reflect that hatred.

WOW uses smaller zones than T3D is capable of, it has some dead clever zone stitching code but really thats all, recreating that kind of system is possibly your best bet if you want a 'seamless' world. This is something that i'm looking to eventually for my game, but frankly it is a lot of work to save a small loading screen in my opinion. A pseudo paging option seems the closest i'll ever come to this kind of functionality, take a mission and create a smaller LOD object of that mission and use it somehow to display when you approach the zone point, pre-load or something and you have a pseudo seamless world, tho i'd imagine this comes with a caveat in the form of memory usage.

Just to add some other comments, there are ways and means of bypassing certain terrain problems, in particular where you mention creation of a river, here i do have the same problem as you, however, decoration of a rivers edge is simpler than terrain resolution fixes, creation of special material for terrain texture and a groundcover set specifically designed for river edges hides the terrain resolution quite nicely.

#17

Quote: Just to add some other comments, there are ways and means of bypassing certain terrain problems, in particular where you mention creation of a river, here i do have the same problem as you, however, decoration of a rivers edge is simpler than terrain resolution fixes, creation of special material for terrain texture and a groundcover set specifically designed for river edges hides the terrain resolution quite nicely.

hmm so what your saying is I could just create mini terrain blocks at a higher resolution and blend them together, never thought about that. Actually now that you mention it, that would be a great feature to be built into the river editor itself (if any dev's read this wink wink).

I have worked with advanced terrain features in AutoCAD (I work in civil engineering) and I think a few tools that apply to real world building of roads and canals would integrate nicely into Torque 3d software.

In particular, Watershed is a tool that simulates water falling on the terrain and maps out paths automatically of natural waterways.

#18 I know this is a old thread but i had to comment.

It is easy to dwarf wow's land mass area, considering there player and mobs are scaled down to 1/10th the size of the player in T3d. If you scale down you'r player and dts and difs and mobs to the size of the normal players ankle you have made the terrain 20 times bigger.

As the original owner of serria once said,after making kings quest. its all about the scale of the model not the world.
I have the succubus from wow in my game shape folder. when i put it in my game to look at the scale, the succubus is half way up to my players knee.

In other words ,look at the movie ,hony i shrunk the kids, look how big there front yard was . Thar ya go.

#19 If only it was that easy, you are correct to a degree but there is a finite size and thats that.

As I said in my post WoW doesnt have one land mass, it has dozens of them, making a single mission area bigger and better than wow is easy enough, heck its engine is a decade old.

A single area is limited by the number of co-ordinates it can pack into a finite resolution, changing the size of the model makes 0 difference, actually thats not true, it potentially makes the problem worse, by decreasing the working resolution. On top of that you make the terrain look even worse because you have to increase the quality of your textures to match.

Not to be picky, but bringing up a 20 year old quote in a field of technology thats advancing faster than almost any other field is pretty much redundant, problems then are not the same problems now, we have moved beyond memory capacity and processing problems in real terms.

#20 Grr, silly internet eating my reply.

As Bloodknight said, the idea of scaling everything down is a myth that needs to disappear. The scale delta between WoW content and Torque content is likely due to art pipeline differences.

If you scale down all your content, you do get a larger terrain, but you run into the real problem, floating-point imprecision, much sooner. All the numbers used for storing object positions and stuff in a 3D engine have some small amount of inaccuracy. This is usually in the submillimetre range when you're close to the centre of the world (0, 0, 0). But due to the way FP numbers behave, this inaccuracy becomes larger as you move away.

If you scale everything down by 10, then these errors start to become noticeable at 1/10 of the distance. Where you used to have a 1mm inaccuracy at 1,000 units, you'll now have a 1mm inaccuracy at 100 units. Those 100 units will appear to be 1,000m, due to everything being at 1/10 scale, so nothing lost - nothing gained.

You can get a larger terrain by scaling down your content, or heck, simply by setting the terrain block size to 1000! But you'll never be able to explore it all until you sort out your FP inaccuracy, never mind filling the area with content, etc.