Terrain-optimizing RangerMK2

ThommyE · Post by **ThommyE** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 7:06 pm

i wondered if anyone knows about this.
i recently remembered this nice little terrain-demo...
someone already mentioned it in the forum but it seens noone read it since it was kind of off-topic.

well there is an pretty nice way to display REALLY HUGE..(and i mean REALL MASSIVLY HUGE!!) terrains. -have a look at the video or the demo. first video is..*speechless*

http://web.interware.hu/bandi/ranger.html

i'm a programmer noob so i'm cant make it myself.. but maybe someone feels like writing a new terrain-node?

since everything there is open source and well documented it shouldn't be too hard.

well- volunteers step to the front =).

just imagine a battlefield like game with a 100x100km terrain... guess this would cause a few thousand player- servers =)

if your'e too lazy to look through the side.
this is the video... i mentioned... made with a (4 todays standarts) mid-low budged pc
http://web.interware.hu/bandi/video/ranger00.avi

imagine the same thing + some extras with a high end pc.. gf7800 etc..
please wake me up! this cant be real=)

Midnight · Post by **Midnight** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 11:11 pm

holy poop that is massive... wonder how difficult it would be to use for gaming... I doubt it would be very easy to make this work in irrlicht with collision and what not.

dhenton9000 · Post by **dhenton9000** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:03 am

This is the first time I could walk into a skybox and reach the scenery! The background acts just like a skybox, except you can eventually get there! This might not work with irrlicht collision detection, but newton could probably handle it. Newtons collision detection can be used separately from the physics part if needed.

Do I hear custom scene node?

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 2:11 pm

This looks very impressive. I'm going to take a look at it and see if I can get it implemented in Irrlicht. The trickery is in the pixel shading, I believe.

I don't know if Newton can handle it very well. When I last checked with Newton, I was told that it doesn't handle making certain meshes active or inactive, especially large static ones. The time it takes to build the geometry data for a large convex hull, was too much. I looked into the serialize function, and having the geometry data pre-calculates, but the serialize function would take over 10 minutes and still be running, if terrain tile was larger than 512x512. Hopefully it's improved, but if it hasn't, Newton won't be able to handle this.

ThommyE · Post by **ThommyE** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 2:57 pm

@Spintz - what do ya mean with"looks very impressive"??.. ever saw a realtime terrain drwaing 100square km with a ground resolution of 2,5m??(well its optimised but it still looks like). i couldn't speek for nearly an hour,whatching the movie over and over again..

maybe you could splitt the terrain into pieces and just let newton handle the parts actually needed.. or mabe the idea is stupid. perhaps a collision detection based on the terrain-image would be more reasonable.
bdw.. we wont know how and if irrlicht/newton will handle the collision if we dont give it a try.

where are the volunteers?

make a nice grafic-demo with it and irrlicht will improve even more =).

what would you think about a 2-player splitt-screen off-road racing-game?;)

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Nov 06, 2005 10:04 am

// Bump

Spintz wrote:
I'm going to take a look at it and see if I can get it implemented in Irrlicht

Please, please do it. You are the one who gets it done. I am pretty sure people will help you, but i am not sure wether you need help. Its so sweet to see how this runs on an older system with a GF4TI. Makes me feel like sitting in front of a Cray

PLEEEEEAAAAASSSSE.

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 12:15 am

I'm still looking into it, very very busy at work, busting my rear, demos coming up at work and experiments etc. Honestly, I probably won't have time for this until some time after January!!!

Midnight · Post by **Midnight** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 12:16 am

wtf is a cray?

and g-force ti's where really nice back in the day...

a 64mb ti 200 kicks my mx440 128mb's ass.

jam · Post by **jam** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 12:22 am

Midnight wrote:wtf is a cray?

a super computer.

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 2:07 am

http://www.cray.com/products/x1e/specifications.html

I'd like that computer

jam · Post by **jam** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 2:11 am

Spintz wrote:http://www.cray.com/products/x1e/specifications.html

I'd like that computer

are you going to carry it into your home too

Weight 5,754 lb

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 1:33 pm

any ideas how much $$$ that computer will cost me

?

to the terrain: sure impressive, but how would you want to use that? levels that big cannot be handled by any game engine anyway (you have to think of the 1000000 objects, npcs,textures and other things that are needed to full so much space) i think.

but maybe for flight simulators

MrPotatoes · Post by **MrPotatoes** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 3:53 pm

flight sims it would be perfect for. you can be very generic with the collision

secondly, if you stream the world in, big chunks at a time, it would be great for an MMORPG. that would just be fantastic honestly

pfo · Post by **pfo** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 6:41 pm

I don't know if Newton can handle it very well. When I last checked with Newton, I was told that it doesn't handle making certain meshes active or inactive, especially large static ones. The time it takes to build the geometry data for a large convex hull, was too much. I looked into the serialize function, and having the geometry data pre-calculates, but the serialize function would take over 10 minutes and still be running

Yeah, I don't think something that big would work with Newton. The biggest terrain tree I can manage with IrrSpintz and Newton is 256x256, and even that takes a good while to load (almost too much IMO). However, user mesh collision could handle that really well, plus you wouldn't waste all that memory with a collision tree.

IrrSpintz terrain node is great, but that Ranger MK2 terrain is really awesome!

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 1:45 am

I asked on the Newton forums a long time ago, for the ability to dynamically add/load large terrain chunks for tiling would be possible, and for some reason Julio said it couldn't be done, that to just load it and leave it is best. The problem is, load times, at the time were really slow for optimized 1025x1025 terrain data. Serializing the data wasn't an option, because the serialized data was very large, like 50MB, if i remember correctly.