Generate terrain by heightmap or load a mesh?

r2d2 · Post by **r2d2** » Fri Oct 01, 2004 9:45 pm

What do you think is better?
I tend to say that loading a mesh would be better and perhaps a little bit faster and nicer but i am not really sure. I hope that this topic will be well discussed ^^

AssiDragon · Post by **AssiDragon** » Fri Oct 01, 2004 11:06 pm

Generating terrain from heightmap is a better way to go imho - that's if you can get more heightmaps loaded in at once (so you can create overhangs).

Loading in a whole mesh as terrain can get ugly when you try to apply LOD and other feats like that...

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Oct 02, 2004 8:03 am

i think loading from a heightmap is the better solution. for me its easier, faster - and the filesize is veeerry small. and you can set the terrain size etc. directly after its created in code. i guess every modern engine loads their terrains from heightmap

r2d2 · Post by **r2d2** » Sat Oct 02, 2004 9:34 am

Yeah sure if you look at other engines then using heightmaps is normally much better but what about irrlicht?
It takes somehow very long to load a single heightmap and with 50000 polygons irrlicht is already at the maximum it can draw on a GF4 without dropping the FPS under 25.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Oct 02, 2004 10:28 am

then you are doing something wrong. my terrain looks really nice and runs pretty damn fast (250-300 fps in D3D9, 125-150 in OGL). it takes more time to load the irrlicht level as load my terrain, so i cant say that terrain takes long to load.

r2d2 · Post by **r2d2** » Sat Oct 02, 2004 12:14 pm

oh i noticed where the problem is lod or something comperable is not implemented. and there is another problem loading heightmaps with a sice bigger than 128x128 takes VERY VERY long but i need a much bigger terrain

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Oct 02, 2004 12:56 pm

then why dont you scale it bigger?

Code: Select all

	terrain = smgr->addTerrainMesh("terrain",
		terraintexture,				//For texturing
		terrainheightmap,			//Heightmap
		dimension2d< f32 >(128.0f, 128.0f),	//Stretchsize
		2000.0f,				//Maxheight
		dimension2d< s32 >(128, 128));		//defaultVertexBlocksize

look at the line "Strechsize", there you can define the size of the terrain. i have choosen 128.0f,128.0f

r2d2 · Post by **r2d2** » Sat Oct 02, 2004 1:32 pm

yeah i know that but if you stretch your terrain you have less detail and i need detail in the terrain because it should be a under water world with deep craters in it
using stretch size makes the terrain but you will get less detail on the other side using a bigger heightmap gives you much more detail but it task much much longer to load a 512x512 heightmap takes at least 2 mins to load

not very fast