Nikos terrain

Tope · Post by **Tope** » Mon Sep 29, 2003 11:26 pm

Niko - great looking terrain screenies on the main page!

May I ask what algo you are aiming for? Brute force? Geomip? ROAM?

niko · Post by **niko** » Tue Sep 30, 2003 6:55 am

just simple geo mipmapping, nothing complicated.

powerpop · Post by **powerpop** » Thu Oct 02, 2003 10:09 pm

niko - will the terrain be just another object on the scenegraph (so we can mix other objects without requiring a terrain specific manager) - hope that makes sense - i had used ogre a bit and found that to do outside terrain you had to use a specific scene manager which didnt handle clusters of individual obects very well - so mixing and matching octree, terrain and bsp was not possible - i would be happy just using octree overall and having the terrain object do its own rendering with hints from the octree

anyways, the terrain looks FANTASTIC

niko · Post by **niko** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 6:40 am

The terrain is implemented as a scene node and it will be as easy to handle as the other scene nodes, yes. A sceneManager->addTerrainSceneNode(yourTexture, yourDetailMap, yourHeightmap, someOtherOptionalParameters); should be enough.

powerpop · Post by **powerpop** » Mon Oct 06, 2003 9:59 pm

that sounds good, although making it truly another node on the scene tree would be better imho - a node with hints about rendering a terrain - but it should be possible for me to make 8 terrains (smallish) and place then side by side or (this sounds crazy but there is a use for it in my app) to place a couple terrain nodes floating above each other at some distance - and the terrain node can be given some hints when rendering (like viewing direction, location of camera, LOD stuff) - the hints could come from the scene manager

just an idea for more flexible use of terrains - it just has always seemed to me that the terrain didnt really need to manage the whole scene - it just needed to know where the player camera was and some distance hints and then it could do its thing in a self-contained manner

powerpop · Post by **powerpop** » Mon Oct 06, 2003 10:05 pm

oh, and on the terrain screenshots - are the shadows generated in the engine or are they prerendered in the textures?

powerpop · Post by **powerpop** » Tue Oct 07, 2003 1:40 am

another question - on your terrain how will we set the scaling of it? - for instance if i define a size for my player character how will i adjust the scaling of the terrain, and its placement? - its interesting to think about scale when one can use terrain for a tank sim or an FPS

and it would be amazing if the terrain calls enabled one to give a heightmap level for the edges of a terrain graphic so that if we tile two or three or four together the edges will automatically stitch together at the given height level (rather than requiring that the heightmap graphics be made to fit beforehand - so i could tell it to match at height 128 and take 5 steps get to that height

powerpop · Post by **powerpop** » Tue Oct 07, 2003 11:03 pm

forget that third post back - i think thats what you said above - that the terrain node would just be another node in the tree - so what i want to do will be possible