Atlas in game Editor?

#1 Like OpenGL, it has not been dropped (not yet anyway) but pushed back. I'm not 100% sure on the details, but after TSE 1.0 somewhere.

#2 This is most unfortunate news. I hope that it doesn't get dropped.

#3 If you know how to produce an atlas terrain, you can see how difficult it must be to produce a real time atlas terrain editor. i dont blame them if they decide to drop it. but it would have been really cool if they got it working. In my opinion, they should have just kept the legacy terrain, or made a new one like it with larger texture sizes, and multiple detail/bumpmap textures.

#4 Marcus, you could make your terrains in Legacy terrain and then get them into Atlas.

#5 It's been mentioned a few times, but I admit it's subtle:

One of the big aspects of the re-write of Atlas into Atlas2 (other than redesign from a performance/capability perspective) was to allow for importers and exporters.

The current pipeline for Atlas import takes heightmaps and converts them into polys. These poly based representations can then be exported into any file format you want--including those readable by, say, Max, Maya, or even possibly Blender/Milkshape.

Once the exporter has been written (by us, or any enterprising community member), you will be able to export your Atlas data, bring into Max/Maya, edit them in tools designed for 3D poly editing, and then bring back into Torque.

IMO, much better than any in game editor we could write without a year+ of additional development.

#6 So that's how it's going to work! Makes sense now.

#7 It would still be nice to have real-time editing abilities for minor changes. But, I guess I'll have to make due. I hope Lightwave Dave will get busy with a Lightwave exporter. :)

#8 We need to be able to poke holes for dungeon entrances.

#9 That can be done in Max. Also, you could just have a trigger that changes your position.

#10 Its not really a problem for me to edit a terrain mesh, but what about the people who don't own 3D software or don't know how to use it?

#11 Editing Atlas terrain would be a major pain if you didn't know how to use 3d software. The Atlas terrain is leaps and bounds more complex than the standard heightfield terrain. The more control we get over the specifics of the Atlas terrain, the more editing it will become like editing a model. Sorry if that doesn't make sense, its like 1AM here and I'm sleepy.

[Ishbuu]

#12 @Stephen

Does that mean there finally wont be a ingame editor for Atlas? Or do you mean that's something we could use until the editors arrive?

3dsm/Maya is out of reach for indies.

#13 Blender and Milkshape are not.

And what type of ingame editor exactly do you want? --don't say "just like TGE", because Atlas isn't a heightmap (once imported)!

There are still plans on having some form of ingame adjusting of Atlas terrains--I didn't mean to give that impression. Providing a full free poly editor system in game isn't in scope of TSE 1.0 however, so keep in mind that detailed editing (creation, etc) if needed would probably go through the exporter to 3rd party app chain.

#14 Is the exported terrain just a massive blob of geometry, or something else? I ask this because there's something bothering me: if we need to generate a heightmap, convert it to an Atlas2 terrain, then export it into polygons, edit the polygons, then re-import the polygons back into the terrain, why not simply create the geometry directly in a 3D package and import it into an Atlas2 terrain?

Unless there are some major restrictions on how much the exported geometry can be edited (can polygons be added/removed, or you can only move vertices around?), I don't see why the pipeline needs to be that complicated.

#15 It's just a huge hassle to place DIF's on the terrain when you cant do any changes to the terrain ingame. That's all.

#16 I'm new to atlas2... does that mean that it does not support destructable terrain?

Ie can have explosions, meteors, etc that deform the terrain?

#17 If you really think about it, Atlas2 editting is actually going to become EASIER as it matures. If you're an artist at heart, you are well familiar with at least one editor you can export/import with. If your a coder, then you surely are familiar with deforming TSMesh's ingame, in real time. Same basic concept, either way.
An ingame editor may not be on the front burner atm, but a few of us are quite confident we can accomplish much of the requirements for one, and surely a few will be posted as resources. I'm nearly positive I could port terrain deformation, hole making, building area flattening etc. in just a few hours. However, Ben is behind the scenes right now tossing fixes, improvements, and optimizations at us with increasing frequency. Let the dust settle, and you will have your tools shortly afterward.

#18 Eric has nailed it on the head---the new representation of Atlas gives you a huge advantage to do whatever you want.

--Don't want to work with a heightmap based generator? Create an importer from a .max file and make all of your terrains in Max/Maya. You could even model in organic scenery objects such as rocks, trees, ravines, rivers, whatever you want.

--Want destructable terrain? I worked on the networked terrain deformer in TGE, and it was a pain in the butt having to deal with heightmap based terrains. Now that they are poly based, it's much more trivial to get amazingly more interesting deformations--how about letting your players use mining explosives and mine their own tunnels and caves into a mountain? Can't do that with hieghtmap based terrain.

--There won't be any more concept of having to do a "set empty" in a heightmap based terrain anymore to place difs well--you could do one of many things:
----wait for the in game "adjustor" (I just made that term up, but wanted to differentiate from a full on polysoup editor in game) and use it to flatten/shape the area around it.
----export to max/maya, edit the terrain poly style, and bring it back in, then place the dif.
------export a section to max/maya, edit the terrain, export to dts, then bring it into Constructor as a static shape and place your dif on it, then let Constructor export it as a unified DIF.

#19 Will there at least be a texture blender/editor like TGE? I remember there was some talk of that.

#20 The fundamentals of the new atlas2 terrain are basically a paged mesh dataset with a clipmap based texture available for the reasonable runtime costs for the main terrain texture working set (your looking at a reasonably small memory footprint for a very large texture set).

The upshot is that basically, we're looking at what is effectively a polysoup, but with a specific texture schema that keeps the potential texture working set within reason. That means that the logical next step is to extend the polysoup, provide some of the basics (like cutting holes and maybe simple vertex operations like flatten/smooth), although these could be much easier done using a 3d app.

Whats more interesting, is the ability to extend atlas2 towards the general case..

Anyway, atlas2 definitely has a lot more potential than the old atlas system. It does need some more work though, but thats "in progress". I'm really looking forward to seeing the final results of atlas2's potential soon :)