Off to Trip the Yule Fantastic

#21 Woohooo

#22 It's the Forest Pack, which is still called the Forest Pack. Elixir is for viewing source code documentation. I've added a note to the .plan to explain this. :)

#23 When I saw this, I was thinking of TSE since my instant association was Resident Evil 4. Knowing it is TGE really makes me giddy.

#24 awesome foliage, dude

cant wait for that

#25 OOOooooo.... I want this!

#26 And I want to get it done... nothing'll happen till after New Year's, though, as the artist doing the environments won't be back till then and he left his art in Eugene... D'oh! :P

It'll be nice to get rested up, though.

#27 Awsome, man! ;)

Ben, what is the very, very, very approx. date for OpenGL support in TSE? Q4 2006? ;)

#28 Just out of curiosity, is Atlas 2 more of a "re-write Atlas 1" or more of a "lets get a terraformer in there and some familiar tools for the Torquers...and tweak it while we're at it"?

#29 @Alexander - nice try, but no comment. ;)

@Jeff - It's a continuation of where I left off after the initial release. A little of column A, a little of column B.

#30 Yeah, I tried to be sweet and innocent ;)

#31 Thx Ben...sorry to ask one more question...
what's the benefit of using one large texture for the terrain instead of tiled textures? It seems that stretching would occur to a point where it is extraordinarily pixelated. I think I remember reading that Atlas uses 1 large texture file...if I'm wrong...then just tell me I'm wrong :D. Thx

#32 Atlas currently supports one large texture. While normally this looks awful because of hardware limitations (you max out around 1-4k on a lot of hardware), Atlas does a bunch of clever stuff to support textures of practically infinite size. You do have to pay for the texture data that's visible, so you're limited by the amount of video RAM you have, but Atlas pages out the detail that isn't visible. So even a relatively low end card can comfortably support a 16384 by 16384 image. Which if you're stretching it over a 4km square terrain, gives you 4 texels/meter, which isn't too bad, and you can always give it a 32k square image, which takes you up to 8 texels/meter... you can go up as high as you want and get quite impressive texture densities, if you're willing to put up with the hasstle of messing with masssive images. ;)

So the big issue becomes authoring this massive texture, and dealing with the fact that it takes a fair amount of space to store. I'm working on some stuff for the next revision to make it manageable to create and edit these large textures, as well as texture blending so if you just want to blend pre-existing textures a la TGE's legacy terrain, and not ship a big texture database file, you can.

#33 Ben, you may want a facility where you blend textures, TGE style, in the creator/editor, but then save the blended results back to your big texture or a second big texture to act as a blend layer. The process can then be repeated until you have your final, perfect big texture.

#34 Hey Ben, something I thought would be interesting in TSE would be what is refered to in L3DT as "texture splatting". This is were you import alpha maps to your terrain and the program uses those alpha maps to generate its own texture. You could do this for only certain areas at a time and save yourself all that harddrive space and have a massivly high resolution texture as it would generate only certain areas during the actual gameplay.

#35 @Duncan - yup, definitely planning to do this! :)

@Jacob: Yes, absolutely. I've been doing heavy R&D on this recently and should have a texture blending implementation in Atlas pretty soon. Getting a blending implementation running super smooth takes a lot of exacting work, though, so it might take longer than usual to get from the 90% point to "finished."

If we're lucky I'll be able to do some interim code drops on Atlas to you guys, though.

#36 Is this something like this, you're trying to do?

HTC is now able to manage up to 64 textures (a la TGE) with full blending. This give us a 256 Texels/meter resolution for Atlas.
I post a more detailed plan tomorrow to show you HTC's evolution.

Edit : Some HTC's capabilies.
Edit : Change Screenshot.

#37 Ben, now that you're going to work on Atlas, I Have some suggestion for you :

TQT File & render : The most important issue in Atlas is texture rendering for low distance with camera. I Have solved it by making a texture DataBase wich can handle up to 64 textures. To do this I had to modify Altas HLSLs.

Making Hole : We can't make holes in terrains. With Legacy you could place DIF and make hole in terrain. I think their should be a function to make hole into Terrain (for DIF, DTS, or for other things).

White texture : When, in a mission file, you place many Atlas instances, Textures are turning to white when you are far away from this instance. (I Think it's solved with my HLSL modifications, but I haven't tried it).

Collisions : With some very "sloped" and irregular terrain, the player sink trough the terrain. It's not a big issue, but it's surprising.

Too Many Triangles : Most of my big terrains crashes in CHU generation. Increasing error metrics and depth seems to solve this problems. Is their a way to avoid TSE crash when it meet too many triangles? This error makes Huge terrain generation very hard.

Shaking shapes : With very huge terrains, shapes are shaking as you move. It's very strange.

I Know, you already know these facts. I just post these few points to make a summary. :)

#38 Hey Ben if interested. I've recently begun looking into that texture splatting I mentioned and it looks very easy and very effective. Basically what I had in mind was to load a single small texture as your texturemap. It would basically just be a bunch of colors, each color representing a texture.

Then you load which materials to use and assign a color for them. Can easily do this through the mission file or in an assigned material file I imagine. So say, texture[0] = grass; color[0] = "0 1 0"; and all green pixels of the texturemap are assigned to grass which is then textured on through the shader.

This is a great thing because you can get as much resolution as you want without any extra space. I've already been messing a lot with textures and for a texture that STILL looks like crap up close, it easily takes up to 70-80 mb. A very high res texture just isn't possible without sapping way too much HD space. With this method though, you can be has high res as you like and only take 1mb or less usually.

You could always play around with this some more too and make somethin really cool. I just thought up how to do some of this just this morning as i was drowsy as hell and gettin ready for school. Haven't had time to really dig into fun stuff, but you get the idea.

This would also be very effective in bumpmapping. Assign each texture to a normal map file and apply that in the shader as well.

And support for loading in a lightmap to cover it all and your good to go. Sound any good to you?

#39 @Jacob : Take a look here www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=38460

#40 Says too many instructions for ps2.0 and seeing how thats all my card can go to, no good.