Finally finished with "base" terrain...for now
12/22/2006 (12:18 am) by Nate "Nateholio" Watson
Screens
Each type of hill is repeated 10 times over an area of 23km/sq for a total of 270 hills. I still need to code the caching routines for loading only hills and objects within view of the camera to keep the poly count down. Im also not sure of what I should do at the "edges" of the map where the terrain features stop. I could just do nothing and let the players continue going on a flat plain, or I could make large mountain ranges that surround the map. One thing I dont care to do is repeat the map over and over or restrict player movement to only within the play area. Ignore the tank and dead trees in the shot, they were there to test sizing and my attempt at making a dead tree model. The problem Im going to run into with having mountains surround the map is that its a little unrealistic for one, and I'll have to figure out a way to make decent looking large mountains quickly. Currently I just use the terrain generator function in MS3D and tweak the settings to make ok looking hills. Ive tried to make mountains but the terrain generator only supports 64x64 maps with a max height of 200. It works fine, but the mountains look horrible when scaled vertically in order to make them steep enough to not allow traversal by players.
Ive also started coding the world generator program so I can just define variables about a map and have it automatically generated using data contained in files about each terrain/vegetation/scrounge/etc object. In tests just generating tree positions, the map file was about 5.5MB uncompressed and contained the species, type, name, and position of 437,500 trees. Seems rather large to me in order to define trees, but I dont know if thats a normal size for such a thing.
About the author
Edumication: Most importantly EXPERIENCE, then a good helping of engineering books, some college, and finally high school. Chipset design: I have designed a complete 32 bit chipset which uses a neat little private bus and instructions among other things to boost system speed without boosting clock speed or bus width. Of course since I don't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this chipset, its just a simulation on my computer. Other Hardware Junk: I built 2 robots in HS, when I had extra time to do so. One was based on the 8080 CPU, and the second on the Z80 (all hail the mighty Z80). The second bot roamed around the house occasionally getting in the way of hall traffic. It eventually learned the layout of the house, bad times to be roaming around, the front and back yards, and a good portion of the street we lived on. Hardware cartridges including software that allowed a user to connect various TI calculators to the internet via dial-up. Never caught on for several reasons, mainly no real need to do such a thing, and the slow speed of the calculators made it silly. Designed and built a HF data link between my home and truck that allowed internet access anywhere in the country, at a slow data rate though. Designed various fully custom Z80 based control systems for customers, using Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGAs as bus controllers that allowed 3 CPUs to share rescources, and also allowed each CPU to function in 'protected mode'. Systems had triple redundancy and functioned in a form of protected mode, allowing a CPU to multitask via interrupts and use peripherals efficiently via multi-threading. Systems were tested through all faults and operated flawlessly with 2 of 3 CPUs literally fried. Game Design: I spend a great deal of my time while on Alert designing vehicles, buildings, spacecraft, tactics, uniforms, etc. for a game I am leading the development of. Other experience: 4-year internship with Harris-Dracon corp. Network Telecom, Camarillo, CA. Worked with engineers to develop a computer program that processed equipment defects and broken parts to allow the engineering team to track trends and quickly fix problems or design better replacement parts. Also worked with engineering team on the design and testing of wireless internet access for PDAs. I was told when I left the company that the team could use my talents and knowlege about electronics, but that I would need a college degree to work for the company. I decided not so much but thanks anyway. TGE Commercial License Holder view profile »