Irrlicht Engine

I downloaded the geomipmap and its up and runnning. True creds to Spintz for making this terrain-stuff accessible to us lesser programmers. Now I can progress with my 3d-based app. Some qs about the possibilities though:

FEATS
Stuff like trees, rocks and goldmines are best done like meshed nodes right? Pretty much treat them as units or structures or any better method?

TERRAIN-TYPE
The example includes a world with one texture, is there any support to "draw" different types of terrain? So several textures can be used, like rocks, mud etc (you know classical RTS or some FPS)

WATER
Whats the best way? I was thinking about having a huge water-textures box pretty low but covering the hole world, and if the land had lower parts, the water would simply be shown, making the valleys in the heightmap lakes. Would it be slow or what do you suggest? Also this would make the lakes completely frozen...

EDIT
Can a heightmap be edited "live"? So I can start planning a editor...


Well thats it.
Suliman, your trustworthy trader in gems and camels

FEATS: Most techniques I've seen use billboards, but it depends on how realistic you want the trees... For boxes/crates in my level, I use scene nodes, but this is because I create a newton object as well, so I can get true physics from my boxes... For rocks, if you want them to stay static use billboards, otherwise use scene nodes, but you'd have to set the collision with them using either a physics engine or Irrlichts collision...

WATER: Look at the specialFX example, this would be a good starting point, for underneath the water you'd have to come up with something different, possibly a test whether you are under water or not would be the best test then texture according to this. This is only a way i've seen discussed...

The rest I don't really know because I've not used the geomipmap yet...

FEATS : Best bet would be to use billboards when they're far away from camera and scenenodes as they're closer.

TERRAIN TEXTURE : There is no current way to multi-sample more than 2 textures at once in Irrlicht.

WATER : Irrlicht has a water scene node, it is rather slow however, especially for large bodies of water. A basic flat node that moved up and down would be a little better.

EDIT : You could modify the vertex positions at runtime in the geomipmapscene node, however, you'd need to re-calculate bounding boxes for culling if vertex position data was changed.

The geomipmap is very buggy in SOFTWARE but runs perfectly in DIRECTX but that might be a known issue...

So you can never have different textures? This limits the useage for me... Im doing a RTS and need different types of terrain. Maybe I can use such billboards you talk of and "overwrite" the standard-ground so I can create areas of grass for example...

That edit stuff, i get nothing of that but its not my biggest problem at the moment.

But do you guys think this is what I should use for a RTS with somewhat similar graphics style as warcraft3 / age of mythology? At some point I will have to be able to code a editor where I can draw terrain...

Can you expand on the buggy in SOFTWARE mode? PM me or email me if you want.

A little bit later, I'll expand my explanations on how to modify terrain at runtime ( and maybe even post an example tonight, it's really not that hard ).

In software, I get "loose parts" of terrain in front of the camera when moving the camera around.

Water:
I try to make a water-plane (as geomipmap or irrlicht waternode i try different) but the edge between the terrain and the water is really ugly, even if the water is frozen/not animated. the water gets "cut-up" just when going under the terrain, like shards of it is seen. I have a pic of it but there is no way to upload here.

Another strange thing:
When loading a heightmap, it loads mirrored. One dimension (the former y and now z) works while the x-dim is backwards. How should I handle this?See below:

Bitmap:

1 2

3 4


Geomipmap drawn

2 1

4 3
[/url]

Here is a screenshot of the mix between waterplane and terrain. It looks really... well... ugly.

http://www.gamedev.se/projekt/screenshot.php?id=26

Thanks for any tips on how to solve this or any alternative on how to make water

Suliman

Spintz wrote:A little bit later, I'll expand my explanations on how to modify terrain at runtime ( and maybe even post an example tonight, it's really not that hard ).

Hi. I would also love to hear that explanation as I'm planning on using this engine for an RPG, which means I'll also need to work with large terrains with complex textures to make realistic landscapes.

While we're at it, do you have any idea how to create nice textures for large terrains? You said that the engine cannot multi-sample more than two textures at once, but does this mean that it's still possible to draw more than one texture on a terrain, assuming you never draw more than two textures on top of each other?

Thanks.

Yes it would be great to know if you could do what Wintran talks of. And do any1 know what my problem is with the heightmap being "loaded mirrored"? Is it simply becouse y is now z? Could I load the heightmap and then turn it so the old y is y and not z. And then use z as height above the terrain (plus adjust the overlooking camera). Would that solve anything?

I'm sorry, been away all weekend ( Thursday thru Tuesday ) will get on to this as soon as I can, playing catch up at work atm.