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GDC & Forest Pack Tech Preview

Name:	Ben Garney
Date Posted:	Feb 16, 2006
Rating:	4.8 out of 5
Public:	YES
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Blog post

Forest Pack Tech Preview 1

Over the past few months, with the help of coworker and awesome dude Adam deGrandis, the Forest Pack for TGE has been coming along in the background... and before I disappear for the next two months (see next section), I wanted to toss something out to the community. It is... the Forest Pack Tech Preview. Just a standalone binary that flies through a little test forest with a little bit of art. The code isn't quite final, nor is the art, but it's finally at the point where I really need more info than I can get on my own computer.

Thus, the preview. Give the preview a try, and if you can spare a few moments, toss us feedback at forestpack@gmail.com. FPS (go to console and type metrics(fps);), if it runs OK (no crashes!), any rendering glitches, what hardware (CPU and video card) you're running on... :)

If it tests well, then you might see a full release sometime after GDC. If not, then it's back to the mines for a while longer to tweak it back up to spec.

And that e-mail address once again - any questions, comments, feedback, problems, screenshots send to forestpack@gmail.com.

Thanks guys! I'm sure you'll give it a good pounding!

(Caveats: This build is partially based on Torque 1.3, so some older Torque issues might resurface; there are also some performance hits due to that. The final pack will of course run on latest Torque. The art is a tiny subset of what will come with the pack, and isn't necessarily representative of final art, either. A real demo of some sort will come later on. :)

Game Developer Conference: Where's Ben?

I'll be at the GDC this year. Because of this, I'll also be pretty much disappearing for the next five weeks. A lot of stuff has to get done between now and then, so I'm having to cut back on everything that's not directly related to making kick-ass stuff happen. :)

If you're working directly on a project with me, I'll still be staying in touch, but otherwise, don't expect to see much from me. :) The other GG guys will be pinging me about important forum threads & so forth, so I can participate if needed...

But GDC should rock. Lots of good stuff will be coming, I think. Maybe even a new Atlas code drop. ;)

Torque Developer Network

Done some work on this, too. Logins much improved, and auto-login was added, too, so now it'll remember if you were logged in before. (Don't worry, if you log out of the GG page it'll ask you for a password instead. :)

A bunch of Safari issues have been fixed, too, so the site should be much more usable for those of you on OS X. :)

You can read about these improvements in the TDN forums.

We also have some other cool TDN-related stuff that we'll be announcing in the near future. But more on that later... :)

Recent Blog Posts

List:	05/30/08 - Next Big Thing 02/12/08 - Come See Me At GDC 2008! 10/27/07 - TGEForest Free Release 10/13/07 - Polysoup Free (And IGC) 01/26/07 - Speaking and Running Into Walls (Collision Fix) 12/25/06 - Merry Christmas, Community - Poly Soup 10/05/06 - Community Weekend (Not-IGC) 06/13/06 - Status Update on Atlas! (also, Ben On Vacation)

Submit your own resources!

Jeremy Alessi (Feb 16, 2006 at 08:49 GMT)

Good luck man! Can't wait to see all the other 'kick ass' stuff ;)

BTW, this preview looks and runs nicely. It really adds a lot to have many detailed trees to the scene ... must have taken quite a bit to get that LOD.
Edited on Feb 16, 2006 08:54 GMT

Gareth Fouche (Feb 16, 2006 at 09:00 GMT)

*Drools on himself over tree pack*

Good luck Ben. Can't wait to see what you guys are working on.

Dreamer (Feb 16, 2006 at 09:51 GMT)

Wow, I just tried that demo out on a computer that tends to choke up on just stronghold and it runs like a champ!
Just curious but there are some things in the zip I would like to use for my own game development, such as the camera path, terrain textures etc... May I co-opt some of it for this purpose?

Vashner (Feb 16, 2006 at 09:54 GMT)

You'll be in the hatch in Lost? :)

I am gonna try my best to get to GDC this year.

Joseph Helm (Feb 16, 2006 at 11:24 GMT)

Runs and looks great... I got about 70fps.

Edit: just noticed something.. when you do a top down view and move left or right, the trees seem to move?
Edited on Feb 16, 2006 11:25 GMT

Phil Carlisle (Feb 16, 2006 at 11:35 GMT)

Ben, I've got some suggestions for atlas if youre up for a bit of user feedback?

Drop me a mail or ping me in IRC if youre interested.

Good luck at GDC bud! hope to see loads of cool new techy stuff coming up soon after!

No GDC for me this year though, faaaar to busy.

Phil.

X-Tatic (Feb 16, 2006 at 12:07 GMT)

Server is down..

Gareth Fouche (Feb 16, 2006 at 12:21 GMT)

Mmmm, that demo was sexy... trees add so much to a scene.

X-Tatic (Feb 16, 2006 at 12:28 GMT)

ah seem, I cant download with DAP.

Nick Zafiris (Feb 16, 2006 at 12:38 GMT)

Ben, nice work! My FPS vary from around 20 to 80. If there was a way to save the FPS at regular intervals to a file, it would probably be more useful.

Nick

Robert Geiman (Feb 16, 2006 at 14:46 GMT)

I got around 60-70 FPS. BTW, is that demo supposed to be running so fast? I couldn't get a good look at the trees the camera was zooming by so quickly. I think each iteration took only 3 or 4 seconds.

It looked good from what I could see though! ;)

Unk (Feb 16, 2006 at 15:25 GMT)

The world totally comes to life! Great job.

FYI: The first time I ran the demo the bushes showed up with black where the alpha should be. I can't repro this though as it seems to be running fine now... *shrug*.

The only thing I did was go into the options panel (ctrl-o) and try to change the video options but the only video mode is OpenGL so I didn't change anything.

My video card is a Geforce4 Ti 4600.

-Unk

Todd McCullough (Feb 16, 2006 at 16:04 GMT)

What exactly is this? Is it simply a tree pack or is there some code being added to quickly cover the terrain with trees? I'm hoping for the latter. Are the trees like some kind of fxshapereplicator? Do they have collision?

I was running the preview with an ATI 9800 getting early FPS of 42 (soaring over water), mid FPS 48 (gliding through the trees) and end FPS of 34 (flying above the treetops) on average.
Edited on Feb 16, 2006 16:05 GMT

Joseph Helm (Feb 16, 2006 at 16:08 GMT)

@ Robert, press Ctr+C for free look. :)

Robert Geiman (Feb 16, 2006 at 16:32 GMT)

Joseph, thanks for the tip! I should have that of that myself. ;)

Ben, it looks great. I can't wait for this content pack to come out!

Todd Pickens (Feb 16, 2006 at 17:57 GMT)

Ben,

SWEET!! Very Nice. Absolutely beautiful trees!!!

I got about 21 FPS on average....bit my pc is old and sucks.

Thoughts and feed back ...Hmm....I am sure you know all of this, but I don't like to assume, so I'll toss it out here just in case.

The LODs pops a bit, if that can be improved to create a more seamless transition, that would be a big plus.

The dead leaf ground texture needs to be broken up a bit with dirt, grass, rocks, fallen logs, or all of the above. This and some vegetation would also be really good along the water edge.

The water need an overhaul.

I understand the gray gloomy winter sky, but I think you are failing to take advantage of a big part of you digital canvas if you leave it that flat. It could still be gray and gloomy, but I would work some more contrast into it. (An area I should have spent more time on in my environment pack)

One of the Age of Empire 3 team (don't remember who) was presenting the game at GDC, or one of the conventions, and said some thing that stuck with me. "what occupies the most screen real estate?" "Spend you art resources on what the player is going to see the most". Or something to that effect.

In keeping with my own rule, "don't show case what you do poorly" ...I mean that in the generic sense, not referring to you specifically :O)

Another way of putting it would be "no part of the environment should be so lacking as to detract form the rest".

That sky is a pretty big part, so I would definitely give it an overhaul as well.

Rubes (Feb 16, 2006 at 18:12 GMT)

Can Mac users check it out too? Just comes with an .exe...

Allyn "Mr_Bloodworth" Mcelrath (Feb 16, 2006 at 18:13 GMT)

There is definitely something going on here.

There are area markers for where trees are NOT to appear it seems. As well as no texture (that I could find) for the alpha portions of the trees. To top that off the alpha parts of the trees do not seem to be displaying the issue torque has with transparencies, especially on trees (or multi transparent objects). Even the small bushes that seem to be made in the standard way, with multiple intersecting planes don
Edited on Feb 16, 2006 18:18 GMT

Stephen Zepp (Feb 16, 2006 at 18:15 GMT)

I don't want to try to speak for Ben, but I know a bit about the pack, and I know he won't get much chance to post here!

@All: feedback really should be sent to the email address if at all possible.

@Todd McCullough: Think of this pack as a two-part concept: art assets, and code. Specifically, the code is essentially a re-write of the fxXXXReplicator concept in a very major way. Yes, the trees have collision, and they are not manually placed--in fact, they aren't even individual objects in your game! Think about that for a minute--in a normal mission, each of those trees would be a networked object. With the forest pack, they are all one networked object, with custom rendering and collision, as well as placement. We're talking the ability to have literally thousands of trees that make up a forest (hence the name of the pack!) in the same performance (cpu, network, rendering) band as "stock" Torque (of course, you'll have varying milage depending on how it's used, and any enhancement does have an associated cost, but the cost has been optimized extremely well).

@Dreamer: No, the textures, as well as the trees are part of the pack. Use of them will require purchase of the pack when it becomes available.

Todd Pickens (Feb 16, 2006 at 18:22 GMT)

...Woops, sorry about that Stephen, I was so excited, I completely overlooked the email address. Will do.

Tom Spilman (Feb 16, 2006 at 19:30 GMT) Resource Rating: 4

@Nick - Enter the following into the console to get the FPS dumped to the console log:

function logFPS() { echo( fpsMetricsCallback() ); schedule( 1000, 0, "logFPS" ); }

Then....

logFPS();

Enjoy!

Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia (Feb 16, 2006 at 19:32 GMT)

I'd want to see if this can be worked in with that shadowing from sceneobject stuff that made the shadows from the alphaed sections of trees as well. For just general filler of treeness this looks like a good extension of the FX Replicator. If it were to be useful for level design though, I think you should be able to have a special brush to clear specific areas from having any trees, so you can use a fairly dense replicator, and cut paths through, to go with terrain and textures that would define your level area.

I think I noticed some funny sorting with the terrain when the camera is spinning around before flying off near the end, though it might have just been the LOD. I got a smooth 60's FPS on my Athlon64 3200 and 6600GT in 1024x768 windowed, so performance was great up my mid rangey system.
Edited on Feb 16, 2006 19:34 GMT

Tom Spilman (Feb 16, 2006 at 19:49 GMT) Resource Rating: 4

@Paul - If you do a class dump in the console you find:

class  Forest : public SceneObject {
  public:
   virtual void addForestEntry() {}
   virtual void addClearing() {}

   /*! @name Transform
   @{ */
   /*!
    */
   MatrixPosition position;
   /*!
    */
   MatrixRotation rotation;
   /*!
    */
   Point3F scale;
   /// @}

   /*!
    */
   int randomSeed;
   /*!
    */
   int forestCount;
   /*!
    */
   float treeDistance;
   /*!
    */
   int minOcclusionLevel;
   /*!
    */
   int maxOcclusionLevel;
   /*!
    */
   bool singleBlock;
};

I think addClearing() is planned to something like what you suggest.

Todd McCullough (Feb 16, 2006 at 19:57 GMT)

@ Stephen Zepp

W00t!

Stephen Zepp (Feb 16, 2006 at 21:30 GMT)

As Tom pointed out:

Quote:

If it were to be useful for level design though, I think you should be able to have a special brush to clear specific areas from having any trees, so you can use a fairly dense replicator, and cut paths through, to go with terrain and textures that would define your level area.

That's exactly how it works.

Adam deGrandis (Feb 17, 2006 at 04:32 GMT)

@Allyn "Mr_Bloodworth" Mcelrath

The trees were all made in the standard way. To my knowledge, there is no update to the zsorting code, although Ben would have to give a final yay or nay to that.

Ben Garney (Feb 17, 2006 at 04:56 GMT)

Nope, it uses completely stock TS rendering code - just calls it in a different way than normal. No fixes in there; it's all just Adam's masterful art skills that make the trees look good. :)

Ben Garney (Feb 17, 2006 at 06:31 GMT)

Oh yeah - ALL the assets in that demo are specific to that demo and NOT for reuse. If you just have to have it, either contact me privately or wait for the pack to come out. :)

James Laker (BurNinG) (Feb 17, 2006 at 07:46 GMT)

This is awesome... (25fps on my crappy machine... So it's working good)

If you go to the World Editor Inspector mode you can see how the Clearing works...
Quite simple... Clicking on the Trees Simgroup makes mine hang though...

In the World Editor Creator (F4) go to Mission Objects-> Environments->ForestClearing to place a clearing... or at least that's how it should work... For me this also hangs...

Mailed the I problems found...

Mike Fosker (Feb 17, 2006 at 14:29 GMT)

I had some issues running this on a fairly old test machine at work.
I'm using a 1.3Ghz Athlon with a GeForce 2MX.
The program ran pretty slowly, as you'd expect, at about 8 fps, although reducing the resolution to 640x480 helped a bit.
A more important problem was that the texture on the trees dissapeared as they came closer to the camera. It seems like as the highest LOD was loaded that the textures all dissapeared, leaving me with grey tree trunks with grey squares on them. The smaller trees in the distance looked fine.....until they came close to the camera.
I guess that this isn't a forest pack issue, but I dunno.

Apart from that, I thought that it looked lovely, and will be an excellent addition to Torque.

Allyn "Mr_Bloodworth" Mcelrath (Feb 18, 2006 at 18:59 GMT)

@Ben Garney

"Nope, it uses completely stock TS rendering code - just calls it in a different way than normal"

What do you mean "different way than normal"?

And I would be very interested in knowing how he has gotten the standard "X" arrangement of small "shrubs" to work with out the sorting issues. Even with sorting or hierarchy settings that type of plant construction is imposable to make in torque, as it isn

Stephen Zepp (Feb 18, 2006 at 20:30 GMT)

Quote:

but transparencies is a major flaw of torque for me, and this is the only example EVER that I have seen that they are being used with out falling victim to that issue.

Have you taken a look at the TDN article Z Sorting Explained?

Ben Garney (Feb 18, 2006 at 23:19 GMT)

You can most certainly get good transparency results out of Torque, as I think this pack demonstrates. We do some things to make the rendering efficient but it's line for line identical to stock TS when it does render. Meaning, no, I didn't fix anything because it wasn't broken to begin with. :)

(I did fix some bugs while developing this pack, but all of them to parts of the engine that only get used by the forest pack, like a slight bug in how imposter billboards are auto-generated. All of the fixes are rolled into 1.4.0.)

Allyn "Mr_Bloodworth" Mcelrath (Feb 19, 2006 at 05:20 GMT)

@Stephen Zepp

Yes I have, but that doesn
Edited on Feb 19, 2006 05:42 GMT

Ben Garney (Feb 19, 2006 at 05:28 GMT)

Adam wrote that article and I assume followed his own advice when he made the art for the forest pack.

Clark Fagot (Feb 19, 2006 at 18:36 GMT)

Allyn - if SORT doesn't work in lightwave then you won't get properly sorted translucency using lightwave. Am I missing your point?

Joe Maruschak (Feb 19, 2006 at 19:10 GMT)

Allyn,

I don't use lightwave, but if you send me a .3ds of the model, or a .dts with the textures I can open it in the showtool and take a look and possibly make suggestions as to how you can get it to work properly.

Nick Zafiris (Feb 20, 2006 at 14:11 GMT)

Tom, Thanks!

Adam deGrandis (Feb 21, 2006 at 19:39 GMT)

Im a little late getting to this party, but I figured its a good idea to chime in. Better late than never, right?

The trees/shrubs were made using the techniques found in TDN tutorial Stephen linked to earlier. I don't believe I used SORT on any of the shapes to keep the polycount down, but I'd have to check the source as I dont remember off hand.

Im sure that if you checked the shapes closely, they probably would display sorting anomolies. I refrained from using wildly different colors within a texture and made sure the branch patterns were varied enough that even if they did sort incorrectly, it would be hard to pick up. Other than that, they were made in the methods I discussed.

Jason Farmer (Feb 21, 2006 at 22:39 GMT)

Ben, are you reading my mind or something? I was considering creating a forest level. Unfortunately, my experiments with the fxShapeReplicator have had dissapointing results, probably my fault and not being careful with my polys.. but this demo runs like a dream. You say it's all networked too? This could be the answer to my prayers if I was a religious man ;-)

I imaging that a networked forest object, with a little tweaking could mean that I could have a dense forest of destructible trees, start forest fires and for this all to be nicely synchronised between all the clients in the game.

But at the moment, I'll take a forest that renders quickly.

Christian S (Feb 27, 2006 at 16:19 GMT)

This looks great; 57fps at sea, 70fps through village, and 65fps in the woods.

Nice work, yet this reminds me a bit like SpeedTree. Not with the ability to affect single trees with dynamic winds etc. I assume. Looking forward.

Peter Baas (Mar 20, 2006 at 19:01 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

This looks really amazing and hope that the pack comes with textures and all kind of trees in winter, spring like this, summer etc.

Good job love you all at GarageGames

Harvey Greensall (Apr 01, 2006 at 09:18 GMT)

Looks Great.

The lowest FPS I'm getting is about 50, but averages more like 70 or 80

Radeon ATI x700 PCIExpress
Athalon 3200+
1 Gig ram.

Mincetro (Apr 10, 2006 at 00:28 GMT)

I'm getting a average of 60 FPS, but when I remove the fog it goes down to 30.

Radeon 9600XT
AMD Athon64 3000+
512mb ram
WindowsXPx64

Alexander "taualex" Gaevoy (Apr 16, 2006 at 17:23 GMT)

Ave. fps: 65

ATI x800
AMD Athlon64 3700+
1Gb RAM
WinXP Pro SP2

Jackie Hayes (May 25, 2006 at 13:30 GMT)

Hey Ben.....Any updates yet on when your pack might be released?

Thanks....

Ben Garney (May 26, 2006 at 22:35 GMT)

After I release the new atlas. :)

Jojimbo (Jul 31, 2006 at 05:18 GMT)

wow ben the demo is gorgeous,any news on the eta?

Charles Andrew (Aug 31, 2006 at 11:28 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

i want this!!!

Stephan (viKKing) Bondier (Sep 04, 2006 at 19:04 GMT)

Any news of a Mac version of the demo --err... preview? or is it TSE and Windows only?

STef

Jackie Hayes (Jan 06, 2007 at 16:09 GMT)

Hey Ben.....Just checking for an update. Any time frame yet??

Thanks!

Ed Johnson (Feb 08, 2007 at 21:54 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Could someone working on this pack state whether the emphasis of this pack is on the code or the tree models? I'm considering putting together a Forest / Tree pack myself, which is mostly just dozens and dozens of high quality and unique tree models. I would hate to step on the toes of others, or work on this project for months to find out it won't sell...

Ben Garney (Feb 08, 2007 at 21:56 GMT)

This is just a code pack. There will probably be art in it but it's really there just to make the pack as a whole look good.

Jackie Hayes (Feb 09, 2007 at 14:56 GMT)

Any release date yet, Ben??

Thanks!

addiktive (Feb 21, 2007 at 07:13 GMT)

Weve been hunting and hunting for a suitable forest generator/code. Weve been looking at the TreeReplicator one of the community members is working on, and this one. Any ideas when/if there will be anything available to use with TGEA to support large forests? We dont need any models, just the code to implement it without taxing fps.

Cheers

addikt

JoZ (May 31, 2007 at 13:59 GMT)

Any update?

JoZ

Christian S (Jun 01, 2007 at 12:14 GMT)

The shifted devs as far as I know, and as you can see over at this blog.

Tom Spilman mentioned something about thei Forest Kit coming out in May, so I have the fingers crossed :)

JoZ (Jun 11, 2007 at 21:47 GMT)

@ Ben... please, if you read this... Would this be a TGE only or also TGEA?

Tnx,
JoZ

bank (Jun 11, 2007 at 21:55 GMT)

JoZ: see this thread.

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