For now the biggest point i'm working on is the procedural processing of textures. I want to make SLE's strongest point the texture handling.
There are lots of alghoritm I am implementing plus some mine variants to standard alghoritms. (various noise, edge detection for merging images without strange effects ecc. cubic resizing ecc)
Making all features I have planned is a huge work but i'm on the road to do it. Actually the editor can load an "arbitrary" number of textures and merge them into tilesets. Then after a tileset is ready there is no problem for use it. Mipmaps are generated automatically and edges are not visibile from long distances.
You have only to choose wich texture you like to use and modify parameters when mergin them.
Actually there are linear, quadratic and sinusoidal interpolators for doing that, plus an adaptive blending that is usefull for example for merging a grass texture wich is not highpassed filtered with a rock textures that is highpass filtered (the grass seems to grow above the rock, note that what i call "adaptive blending" is similiar to edge detection but is not edge detection).
Here is how it works:
This image show a test terrain for see if there are seem between tiles. Now i'm working on edge detection to make this test terrain looking better(those test textures are takem from http://www.texturemaker.com/gallery.php ... n=ISampler , some week ago those were licensed as "free for free use" now i cheked again and the license seem changed, maybe i will update those screen shots)
The gui of the editor has many options, and there are list box in wich i put all the interpolation i need (I estimated that 16 interpolation are needed for different texture types, actually there are only 4 interpolator available).
Before starting creating a tileset (wich requires lot of time)
a preview of merging the textures is showm using standard textures at 256x256 resolution.
aboveyou can see tileset editor wich allow you to choose how merge texture for make tiles. a preview is shown when making tiles because making a tileset of 7 different terrains using textures that are 512x512 can require up to 5 minutes on my PC. This depend on my procedural api that convert all colors in double for reducing quality loss of the image and on the lots of iterations that are required,(infact using only floats value can cause the images to seem "noised"-).
A future feature that i don't know if I will add is OpenCL support (actually i have trouble with drivers) wich can reduce 5 minutes of computing time to few seconds (or less using GPUs).
Future features planning:
World Editor:
Creating zones with different configurations:
-Quad tiles terrain
-Hexagonal tiles terrain
-Simple surfaces (usefull for makin internal places like dungeons)
-Pseudorandom terrain. (for saving space when creating huge terrains you can only specifify few vertices and the missing vertices are generated randomly on the fly)
-Multiple terrain assets ( 4 detail layer and a mixmap. or 3 detail, a mixmap and a colormap ecc)
Portaling:
-Each zone is connected only to nearest zones. You can choose wich zones are visibile from every zone. (also work with landscapes). This will reduce culling needs.(terrains are not the only possible solution)
Procedural textures:
-Procedural generation of clouds, lava, rocks, smoke, wood, light effects,fire.
-Apply filter when importing textures (make them seamless, apply a different color, apply a frequency pass filter)
-Combining textures using edge detection or frequency detection-
-Combining textures using interpolation (as done by most users via shaders with multiple textures, this time every texture layer has multiple terrain types)
-Compatible with old machines: using at max 4 textures (or less, this only need to change few pipeline assets). Or make incredible textures using more than 4 textures (just imagin adding heightmapt to the 4 textures layers using a total of 8 texture layers for a realistic and parallax mapped terrain). (for work well this require to handle different textCoord for every texture layer wich is not supported for now in irrlicht, actually i can use only 2 textures layers wich let me create nice terrains but not as nice as they will be with 4 textures)
-Special Interpolators are needed for example for merge a brick wall with a stone wall ecc (i don't want to see a brick interpolating linearly with a stone)
-light painting (using or lightmaps or just texture painting).
Mesh handling:
-Texture painting on loaded meshes (or genereated meshes): paint using a texture layer on terrains for adding more details, or paint rocks and trees. (moss. ice, lichens, rust)
-Procedural trees (i will just import the code i have seen in a discussion in the forum)
-Procedural items (just the most used, such as stones, mushrooms ecc).
-Procedural waterfall & water(not decided yet if use a shader or a generated mesh with texture animation and transparency on it).
-weight generated trees and grass (grass and trees are merged into 1 or 2 mesh buffers. if i can i will make them move with wind usin the vertex shader for a realistic but gpu-wise world)
The meshes will take the advange of mesh combining of lonesome ducky so drawing a landscape with all its items will require only few scenenodes each with up to 4 texture layers. ( If I can avoid the use of multiple render pass for combining terrains the performance gain will be good).
GUI:
-the gui is structured like a tree. and will fit the screen. I have tested resizing of the tabgroup from 640x480 up to 1366x768.
-Most options are like pipelines. You must only set the options you like and need.
-This work as an a onion. First you decide what to do, than you import textures, than decide how to use them ecc..
-You create a brushset and then paint (paint terrain, but also trees and any imported 3d model).
-customizable brushes.
-Add item by simply selecting and add
-compability warnings when using shaders higher than 1.2 of glsl(or the equivalent for directX)
-compability warning when using any other features that will be not supported on old machines.
Why using tilesets?
1)Multilple terrain types with only 1 texture (more and more with more than 1 texture)
2)the multitexturing used in videogames is not so much nice, textures are simply interpolated. Using image processing to combine at best will make textures look better.
3)this will save memory. Using a 128x128 terrain with every tile of size 256x256 theorically require (or a detail map and a color map wich save lot of memory but is not so nice) a 30000x3000 texture. With a tile set only 2048x2048 textures (or 4096x4096) are needed and they can be used across multiple terrains. Plus mipmaps+ mixmap (a 128x128 image file , or 130x130.. I'm just deciding now about that)
4) using only 1 texture layer with its tileset and a simple interpolation doesn't look very good. But if i start using special interpolators and more than 1 texture layer the aspect of the terrain will start become very nice.
sorry for english
so maybe for now multiple texture layers have to wait some bug fixes. I have other things to do in the meanwhile:).
