Large Terrains in Torque from Wild Bill

#1 Size is actually arbitrary, very much based on the scale of your objects. Currently, your average computer (by today's standards) will be able to load in a 2048x2048 texture for a terrain map without much effort. If you are not concerned with high details, as the case with flight sims, you can scale that up even further. You can scale a 2048x2048 terrain block by 1,000, and you approaching hundreds of square miles of terrain.

The problem, which is an issue for ANY application, is when your game object (plane) goes beyond 10,000 units away from the origin of the level. This is where you hit floating point precision errors and the engine will shut down. A single unit in Torque 3D is 1 meter. If you scale your plane appropriately, you could essentially simulate traveling 100,000 miles in any direction based on terrain size and model scale.

#2 Hey Bill, not sure if you got my email but if you want to chat about my experiences with creating a flight sim in T3D you can reach me at adamb@ignition-games.com.

#3 Wow, one of the founders of MicroProse, right here in the GG forums. I grew up on MicroProse games. :)

I did some testing in TGEA creating terrains using LIDAR data and draping orthophotos for the terrain texture, but it's been awhile. I had some success, but this was also with Atlas terrain, which is unfortunately not part of T3D.

Michael Perry has the gist of it correct, but I think there is too much assumption that people are not concerned with high detail in flight sims. When I got Flight Simulator X, I was extremely disappointed at the lack of detail, in addition to the fact that supposedly real-world locations did not use real-world imagery to match the locations. Scaling is A solution, but not THE solution. A good flight sim would maintain high detail, and would necessarily include a terrain paging system. That's just my own opinion, though...

#4 @Joe - For sure that is the ideal solution. Terrain paging is the best solution for performance and detail, and would be something I would actually heavily invest time/development into if I were on a flight sim team. Some form of scaling would still be useful, though, due to the floating point precision problem.

#5 Thanks for the responses guys. I appreciate the comments and suggestions. I have also heard from a few guys who have done Torque work and they have some ideas I am checking out too!

In WarBirds, we need to be able to climb to 30,000 feet and see long distances without much detail except rivers and coastlines.

Then when we get to the target we come down to 1000 feet and look for ammo dumps, buildings, hangers, radars, etc. to blow up.

So we have to do a large terrain and then be able to scale up to some detailed objects on the ground too.

Anyone who would like to see some of the WarBirds in game movies can see them here.

http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?page=moviesonline

One of my favorites is Tribute to Preddy here.

http://216.69.168.76/Downloads/WarBirds/Movies/WBIII-352nd.wmv

In it you will see some of the current ground detail that I want to improve.

If you guys would like to try WarBirds, just email me and I will sign you up for a demo account for a month so you can see what we are trying to do.

Cheers,
Wild Bill Stealey

#6 Wow... i think i still have my C64 boxes for Silent Service and Gunship.


:)

So like any engine you do have precision limits.

The best way to work within these limits is to decide on a simulation scale that works for your subject. So if you want like a range of +/- 100km then i would go with 1 Torque unit equaling 10 game meters and build your art appropriately to that.

#7 WarBirds looks pretty good from the videos. I can see why you would want to increase the detail. There's nothing like having more realistic scenery to blow up from the sky. :)

#8 This indeed looks like quite a good use case for Atlas. In-engine terrain editing isn't really too important to have, render distance is usually mid to far (ideal for Atlas--you can get some awesome looking detail out of it like this), and the paging and level-of-detail stuff are well-suited this kind of work.

For the collision mesh, which isn't paged with Atlas, one can cheat in a flight-sim and lock it down to a pretty coarse level in the tree (IIRC I even put a switch for that in at some point so you can decide which quadtree level to do collision at). This allows for some nice close-up detail without increasing the load on the collision system.

With fast moving cameras (likely in a flight-sim) one probably gets into a fight with the Atlas paging core at some point. If that happens, rip out and rewrite would be my recommendation. It isn't much code and in T3D, all the infrastructure necessary to implement a better system is already there.

Though Atlas isn't part of Torque anymore, getting it back into T3D isn't that big a deal. Only getting it to work with Advanced Lighting would require some more serious porting effort (i.e. some shader work), but not sure if Basic Lighting isn't more desirable for a flight-sim anyways.

#9 Thanks Guys,

Do you know an consultant who could assist IENT in implementing Torque 3D as the renderer inside our WarBirds, www.Totalsims.com, game?

We have to prove that we can use our current terrains (15 of them) and current airplanes (over 100) using Torque with limited changes so we don't have to redo completely.

Once we show that, I would want the consultant to assist our programmers putting the Torque as the main renderer inside the WarBirds code.

Please respond privately to me if you think you would like to chat about this assignment or know someone who might.

Cheers,
WB

#10 G'day Wild Bill,
I'm currently porting my terrain system from Ogre3D to Torque3D pro 1.1 Beta 3.

www.youtube.com/user/davlexdesign


I don't know if this is the sort of thing you are thinking might work for you guys, but when I have this thing running under Torque, I don't think there will be a problem with terrain sizes any more.

It works at a 1 Unit is 1 Meter scale, so it will fit right in with the Torque engine I feel.

What I'm doing is getting my system to feed the Current Torque terrain system when really close to the ground, so that all the populating of Flora and stuff will function just the same, and allow portions of the terrain to be editable like any other level, like for towns and key areas as such, while the rest of the surface will be procedurally generated (badlands as such) for those people that like to wonder and just collect stuff.

The videos show a planet about the size of our moon at a 1:1 scale, I've had it up to the size of Jupiter and it functioned pretty much the same as what the current one does, but this one is just a proof of concept, and flying around it takes long enough as it is, so when I can populate it, then the rest is just a setting, and it should (emphasize should) just work the same.

OH, and if you are worried about the frame rates, don't worry, this video was created a while back, and was running on very very mediocre hardware, I have a newer (not super duper) system now, Windows 7 64bit, Intel I5 cpu, 4GB RAM and a Nvidia GT 440 Video card, and the thing runs at around 200 - 500 fps pretty consistently.

Alex