Tgea

#1 Well i can state a few things. There's

unlimited terrain size via atlas.
Faster 3d performance
Shader Support

Probably other things but i can't think of any at the moment.

#2 The docs for the new TGEA are awesome! As for the differences, I'd check the product pages.

I never worked with TGE, but from what I've heard, compared to TGE, TGEA's big things are shaders through a material system, atlas, megaterrain and polysoup. Also, 1.7.x is said to include most of TGE afaik.

A drawback might be that most of the content packs are not using TGEA's features fully. Normal (bump) maps are rare, usually no materials are made to go with the contents, and even if a pack has some, they are not given enough attention, sometimes they are just there as placeholders.

I guess content providers would need some tool to visualize materials.

Once you get familiar with the really simple way of setting up materials, you will love experimenting with shiny stuff and creating materials for your scenes. I always get my daily chimp attract dose, heh.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the way I see it, TGEA has a very bright future, and the fun part has just begun.

#3 How are the starter folders / tutorials for tgea?

#4 @Konrad,

TGEA supports bumpmapping? I didn't know that. I'm not really up on TGEA,but it may be time to upgrade myself...

Tony

#5 Also, does TGEA have the wysiwyg map editor demo availabile, tried downloading the barricade demo so i could play with the features but no luck,,

#6 @Phil: To get started, you just launch an app, give your project a name, and it's created for you along with visual c++ solutions - i think this is really convenient. There are five demos that come with the latest version (1.7.1) which show off the coolest features, and contain many actually useful examples from the gui through atlas to megaterrains.

As for tutorials, the docs are continously evolving, and lots of content is added week by week. They do take docs seriously this time. Many of the code resources that you've seen in TGE are already ported or being ported to TGEA, as more and more people turn over to the dark side. *evil laugh*

It really rocks, you have to see it for yourself. Just get the demo first, check the demo missions, and see for yourself.

@Infinitum3D: Oh yes it does! I spend hours watching the skid marks break the sunlight on my rusty-trusty gunship. And best of all, to set it up you only need to make a normal map (nvidia has a free photoshop plugin that creates one from the texture) and make a material.cs anywhere (all material.cs files are executed procedurally, no includes necessary, you can just leave it beside your texture).

With 4-5 lines, and you set up speculars, bumpmaps, even glow or radiation, etc... You can do some amazing things. And we haven't even talked about shaders... That's some really exciting stuff!

#7 @Phil: Yes, you have the editor for legacy terrain and MegaTerrain.

For Atlas, however, you have to use a third party tool.
L3DT is a great and affordable terrain generator. It's a little hard to shape the terrain however you want it, but it does a nice job.

Grome is by far the best that I've found, they have great video tutorials, and the pro version has no match, but it's really expensive for an indie budget. While Grome rocks, some of its features are not yet supported by TGEA - such as vertically rotated textures (ie. for steep mountain sides, so the texture does not "melt" onto the mountain). The cool thing is that the Grome exporter is open source, and already supports resources such as the 8 blended terrain, so rotated textures are not far off. Both the L3DT developer and the Grome team are really helpful.

#8 So no free atlas tool yet and im guessing you cant use the legacy editor for atlas terrain im just starting out again after alot of time away from tge so trying to justify the leap to tgea or wait and code in tge and then port over, or just make the leap to tgea and learn to code and script there.

#9 No, there's no editor for Atlas included in the engine. I have not heard of a free alternative to create Atlas terrain - but I know that other terrain software also export Atlas format, so it's possible!

The truth is that Atlas - though a great concept - is not of much use with 4 blended textures. The technology rocks, but the bells and whistles are missing still. I'm sure though that not for long.

Decide if you really need a terrain so huge that only Atlas is the viable solution. If you don't, then MegaTerrain with the built-in editor is really convenient and handles more textures. The cool thing about built-in editors is that you can make a shapereplicator and modify the terrain after that to fit your forest for example. With an external editor, to pull something like this off would be extremely painful.

#10 Kewl,. well ill take the plunge, it looks amazing, now the fun part comes in trying to learn how to code.. trying to do a simple online game with persistent world, basics to start with like harvesting and crafting and player stats,, so like most noobs im in over my head lol

#11 Kewl,. well ill take the plunge, it looks amazing, now the fun part comes in trying to learn how to code.. trying to do a simple online game with persistent world, basics to start with like harvesting and crafting and player stats,, so like most noobs im in over my head lol

#12 @Konrad:
So Atlas only supports 4 blended textures? How many blended textures can you use with MegaTerrains?

I currently use tge and I think it's limit is 8, can it be increased easily or does that take a lot of work within the engine to to it?

Thanks and sorry if this is a little off topic.

#13 Well i got it to post to a text file from in tgea, so it was a good night, tommorow we work on reading and comparing info in text files lol

#14 @Johnathon:

Bobby Leighton is working on his 8 blended textures for Atlas code, so it works under the recent TGEA 1.7.1 version. Once that is done, it will be most likely possible to get even 16 textures later on. So there's hope.

I'm not sure how easy or hard it is to increase texture count on the legacy terrain, though I've seen a resource somewhere a week ago or so that talked about having 13 (?) textures in TGE for legacy. I tried to find it now, but no luck - so I might be wrong.

#15 Thanks, I need to save some money and upgrade my laptop so I can get the tgea then, the demo apps I downloaded didn't run to good on my current setup. I'm dieing to get it and mess around with it tho!

How about backwards compatibility? Will existing levels need to be re-created in tgea or is the tgea and tge legacy terrain the same? I'm sure some scripts will need to be tweaked and I'm not to concerned about that, i just don't want to start on a tge project that will be ported to tgea in the end, if I need to reconstruct the levels.

Thanks!

#16 Instead of creating a new thread, I guess I'll ask here :P

In TGE I have had difficulty doing day to night transitions because DIFs use lightmaps, the terrain uses lightmaps and won't dynamically light from the sun, and DTS shape shadows are less than stellar. Out of the box does TGEA offer a quick fix for this (or does a resource exist) - or will I need to write some custom shaders and engine code?

As for the DTS shadows, does TGEA have any shader driven DTS shadowing? Can DTS shadow realtime and can they self shadow and accept shadows from other sources?

Are the GUI Controls any better documented than TGE? Are they the same or better or worse? I've found a majority of them in TGE are either undocumented, poorly documented, or incorrectly documented. Examples are also hard to come by for many of the more advanced GUI controls.

I know the TGEA Legacy terrain can tile now more than in TGE, but can it be deformed over the network (ie, raise/lower the land, add water, etc) out of the box? Or does this require the same type of overhaul it would for TGE?

Is the model toolchain the same for TGEA? Could someone still model/animate/UVMap in MS3D and export the DTS into it? Does constructor work without any issues with TGEA?


I've tried to stick with TGE because I favor Mac/Linux support. Visuals also aren't a huge reason for me to switch aside from the day/night thing. I lack the modeling skills to take advantage of normal/diffuse/bump mapping and wouldn't know where to start with writing my own shader effects. The Modernization Kit is also available for me to make TGE looks badass if I really really wanted it :P

Thanks for clarifying any of that!

#17 You will have difficulty with day/night transitions in TGEA just like you have in TGE. The lighting system is similar in structure and functionality as are the shadows. I would recommend reading the TGEA section on TDN about the lighting system.

There is new documentation for TGEA 1.7, but I do not remember if the GUI systems have been updated in the new documentation.

You will have to code in network terrain deformation.

The modeling toolchain is the same with TGEA as it is with TGE. You may have to export old .maps through Constructor's DIF export if the DIFs are really old.

#18 In The Repopulation I handled day and night transitions in TGEA was to create a new material property called UseSunlight. If a material set this to true (default) then it would capture the suns current color and pass that to the shader and simply multiply that in the generated shader.

That worked pretty well, but had one drawback in that the shadows didn't move by the time of day. You can load in a lightmap in TGEA, but I've never tested to see how quickly this happens. If it could do this on the fly then you could snap lightmap shots at different times and load them by the time of day, but I've never actually tried this. Would be curious to hear of any results if anyone tries.