Irrlicht Engine

Yes you are welcome BlindSide

BlindSide wrote:....Along with an endless tiling-water scene node that incorporates with it.).

Cheers

Wanna see!!! .

blindside+arras... what else we could to expect .

Smooth: when i have recompiled the demo with irr1.4 the terrain was not so mooth as the demo with irr1.3.1 ... so i thought that the smoothing using normals doesn't work the same as in irr1.3.1 .
That's why i have made this smoothing function using Bezier curves.

Vsk wrote:blindside+arras... what else we could to expect

Yeah i really agree with you^^

How is the performances gain between vertex arrays and VBOs ?
If you would use the SMeshBufferLightMap, i not advise you made this change : on the french forum (irrlicht.fr) a member has created a terrain scene node using SMeshBufferLightMap... and the perf was not pretty good... (link : http://www.irrlicht.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?id=336 )

Oh right, I was using the normal SMeshBuffer myself because I had a shader that only needed one set of texcoords. I'll have to see if theres a way around using SMeshBufferLightMap, or if the issues on that thread have been fixed. (I can't read french but I saw some screenshots of artifacts and someone mentioned a 50% speed loss).

EDIT: Hold up, that scene node has nothing to do with Arras's tiled terrain, and it uses a shader that splats 4 textures. I see alot of reasons why it would be slower than the usual Irrlicht terrain.

Infact Arras's tiled terrain is already slower if you make it the same resolution. Usually it runs faster because it is scaled very large so you are only seeing a small part of the mesh, and the normals are smoothed nicely so you don't see it as low detail.

To be honest, I didn't notice much difference between arrays and VBOs in Arras's terrain. I need to debug it and see why because in most cases I would get a 100% increase. I think it's because the current program I am using it in is fillrate-limited, so I will have to make a smaller testcase program to showcase the speed.

Hmm... the shader in the french terrain scene node was not compulsory, it was here just for texture splatting... When i had tested this terrain i had disabled texture splatting... but the performances were always under arras terrain perfs.

Still, that has nothing to do with using a MeshBuffer. If you look at whats happening underneath, using a MeshBuffer is the exact same thing, except with VBOs it allows you to store a link to the hardware buffer.

Cheers

Also, using Lightmap vertices does not put thta much of a load to the gfx backend, hence there should be no noticeable slowdown for just using the vertex2t type.

Havn't read the whole thread.
Just a little question for arras, what is the license of your code?

Its free, no restrictions.

I have a question too.

How hard would it be to take this and make it page the terrain?

It would have to hold some sort of file or image to contain a height map (probably a gray scale image) that when placed in the center produces some sort of terrain from the gray values. Outside that map it would place the terrain at a standard level and that level would then proceed to go on nearly forever (until reaches a high limit)

I would think it wouldn't be hard, but let's say you have a massive terrain. Obviously you would need some way to only load sections of it that is needed. (like 500 meters x 500 meters around the camera at any given moment).

Sorry if that wasn't clear. How hard would that be to do? Could you point me in the right direction if it is possible?

Edit: Also, does this work with Irrlicht 1.4.1?

Yes it should work with 1.4.1, but I was not trying. As much as I know, 1.4.1 is mostly bug fixing version so there should not be problem.

As for keeping data in file and loading part of it according to position, yes it would be possible, but its hard to tell how hard ...probably not that much.

Yes it should work with 1.4.1

I've tested and it works successfully.

Is there a prebuilt version that I could download?.
I like the scene node but I don't want to build it from source.

What do you mean by prebuilt? Library? ...Terrain node contain just four files, three headers and one source, include them in to your project and you can use it.

Hehhehe ummmmm....oops.... it was early in the morning when I posted this, you know when your brain is still in.... boot up?.