Introduction and Simple Terrain Generation

[Brien Shrimp]

Hello, I'm a new Irrlicht user. I've been working a simple 3D game using OpenGL and SDL, written otherwise from scratch. I suddenly realized that I was sick of battling out fundamental problems that have been solved thousands of times over. I was spending too much time re-inventing the wheel and not enough working on the actual game. Classic. So here I am.

Now, I have a few problems after trying out Irrlicht. I want to generate simple terrain like I had in my original game. All I am shooting for is blocky terrain, no rolling hills, no caves, nothing special. Here's a page of a few screenshots illustrating what I mean:
http://web.umr.edu/~bmsgg6/tank/screens.html

Originally, I generated the terrain from a table of numbers representing heights, which I stored in a text file. I dont know if that's possible with Irrlicht. I dont really care, either, as what I really want is HUGE maps, using the Octree optimization.

Is it possible to generate terrain on the fly (no loading from files) AND use the octree optimization as well?

If I wanted to make maps using a Q3 editor, how can I use my own textures and save them in the map so that they are loaded?

Thanks for listening, and please excuse any obvious/stupid questions I ask, I'm completely new to not only Irrlicht but to the world of 3D engines in general.

[niko]

Is it possible to generate terrain on the fly (no loading from files) AND use the octree optimization as well?

Sure, just create the mesh (for example as SMesh and SMeshBuffers) and use an OctreeSceneNode to draw it.

[Guest]

if you want to generate terrain on the fly look into fractal terrain methods. That will provide algorithims to generate random terrain. How you store the terrain data should not matter. You just need to load the heights than you can use that to draw as octree, its not necessary to store the data in the octree format.

From looking at your image another idea for storing your terrain was to simply create a large plane as the surface, then draw block objects to represent the heights.

Hope this helps

[Brien Shrimp]

I want to try creating the mesh using SMesh eventually, but first I'd like to fix a problem that has me frustrated.

I want to create a simple Quake3 map and load with Irrlicht. I spent about an hour yesterday finding and learning how to use Q3Radiant. I made a simple map. I even tested it in Quake. But for some reason, I can't get Irrlicht to load it. I mean, Irrlicht SAYS it's loaded, but it is clearly not being drawn. Sure, Irrlicht will load the map used in tutorial, and it'll even load other maps I've downloaded. Just not mine.

In short, my question is: How do you create a simple Quake3 map for Irrlicht to load?
-What editor do you use?
-How do you generate the BSP?
-How do you get Irrlich to use your textures?

[Guest]

Here is a sample source code for generating fractal ground, aand using filter to smooth landscape.


http://www.games-creators.org/files/fr/ ... Ground.rar


Comments are in french langage.

[Brien Shrimp]

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... .php?t=879

This works. Anyone having problems like those I described, this will probably help.