T3D Final - Terrain partially not rendering (logged as THREED-3165)

#1 I noticed some "overly aggressive culling" on the terrain ... but don't seem to be getting it now ...

... possibly because terrain is never supposed to go below origin Z = 0 ...

If I set terrain pos to "0 0 0" it actually positions itself at "0 0 512", far above the origin and then this culling issue appears to stop.

[edit] I might not know what I'm talking about ... :P

#2 I've been trying to reproduce this but not having any luck. I have tried with both Nvidia and ATI graphics cards. Can you give me your pc specs so I can try to track down the problem.

#3 Does the culling occur after you've saved and restarted the engine?

#4 Okay, managed to get it to happen again - helps if you've NOT got a flat terrain, helps if there's a water plane underneath, if the camera is low to the ground and you pan up ---- doesn't seem to happen on reloading the level, just when you've added the terrain.

#5 That's what I figured, we noticed this during 1.1 testing. Manipulating the terrain would sometimes cause the terrain to clip when it shouldn't until the level was saved and reloaded.

@AF
Do you get the same results as Steve?

#6 Yeah I don't see the problem when I reopen the game but everytime I edit the terrain the problem does happen.

#7 My issues usually arise as a result of the terrain editor and terrain painter brushes occasionally behaving erratically in areas where the terrain is very steep. Sometimes it will jump about the terrain and I'll find spots that were displaced or painted clear on the other side of the map. This has been reported elsewhere - and is probably unrelated... lol!

#8 I think I had the same problem you show in the images. It did seem to be caused by the FOV value of the camera/player. I had a value of around 90 with mountains diappearing and popping into view. I changed this to 45 and the problem seems to have vanished. With a little trial and error I did get the max value for the FOV where this problem didn't occure anymore.

#9 Logged as THREED-3165.

#10 I was hoping these issues would be fixed in 1.2 but I'm still seeing them after applying the 1.2 patch.

@Richard Ranft: I'm still having that problem as well... the brush starts to lag and then pop around randomly on the terrain and I find weird displaced terrain far away from where I was editing.

I really wish someone would dig into the terrain editor bugs and get them fixed; at the moment terrain editing is a painful crapshoot -- can't seem to really get anything done with it.

#11 Ok, one more issue that seems to have cropped up since I applied the 1.2 patch.

If I load T3D from the toolbox directly into the World Editor and then try to do any terrain editing, as soon as I left-click to apply the tool (any of the tools) it becomes laggy and completely unuseable, i.e. the brush is completely smooth until I click to apply the tool, but then it moves at a rate of something like 1.5-2 seconds per frame.

Any ideas what's happening there?

Edit: Meh... got it to kinda work smoothly for a bit, but now it looks like it's doing it all the time now, no matter how I load T3D.

#12 @Kevin
Sorry, I should have gone into more detail when I last posted in this thread back in August. This was shipped as a known issue in both 1.1 and 1.2 as the steps to reproduce made it something that was not very severe. It lost in priority as there were much higher priority issues to address.

As for the lagging you're seeing, I never saw anything like that when testing the patch. Was this applied to your own custom codebase or clean install?

#13 @Scott: Thanks for the additional info. I agree that since saving/reloading the mission fixes that particular issue, it should be low priority (would still be nice to get that fixed). My primary concerns are more about the first issue with the laggy, randomly popping brush, and of course, this new laggy, unuseable brush problem.

I applied the patch to a nearly clean codebase; the only thing I had added in there was this: www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/129499

By the way, it looks like the issue with the randomly popping brush is likely related to "THREED-1966 - Terrain Editor brushes can have terrain position errors from certain camera angles". I guess this hasn't been fixed yet...? Any known work-arounds?