TerrainManager discussion
by Pascal · in Torque Game Engine · 02/19/2004 (9:42 am) · 11 replies
Hey,
Does anyone know if work is continuing on terrain manager? If not, is anyone
up for helping me get it back into a more polished state?
-Pascal
Does anyone know if work is continuing on terrain manager? If not, is anyone
up for helping me get it back into a more polished state?
-Pascal
About the author
#3
02/21/2004 (1:32 pm)
I download Gorpe from CVS and I was very unimpressed. Is what is in CVS under the Gorpe all there is? If not what am I missing.
#4
-Pascal
02/23/2004 (9:56 am)
I didn't really look at GORPE except for the latest TerrainManager stuff. I think it has IDE with it and TGEPython compiled in but I don't think it had that much else (I didn't really look so don't trust me). Development seems to be stalled right now.-Pascal
#5
Hiya Pascal this is the area of continue interest for me and my team of getting much larger terrains in torque. TM is a heavily modified torque. and I think for what is there DS has done some pretty good work. He pick up the baton from another.
@Dan
Hiya Dan, I guess by your statement you were unimpressed means you can improve it heh. seriously the man can only do so much by himself so any additional help would be great. :)
There is a group working on a MMORPG using torque who said they have the ability to load additional terrain blocks on the fly. On their site you can read the log to see some of the progress made on that but I think, and I may be wrong they have stopped development but I can't read Italian so I dont know exactly what it is.
The only thing I see is somehow being able to alter the entire terrain in torque editor and having torque save those changes. Since the engine already repeats the terrain to infinity. I wonder if loading a flat basic terrain and altering it manually would be better than trying to change the whole terrain engine.
Ben Garney kinda pointed me in that direction. My desperate plan is to clone the brains of certain torque members and make a living brain pool. All I will need is some ancient egyptian tools and a moment of thier time to get the needed cells. heh
John H.
02/23/2004 (11:08 am)
@PascalHiya Pascal this is the area of continue interest for me and my team of getting much larger terrains in torque. TM is a heavily modified torque. and I think for what is there DS has done some pretty good work. He pick up the baton from another.
@Dan
Hiya Dan, I guess by your statement you were unimpressed means you can improve it heh. seriously the man can only do so much by himself so any additional help would be great. :)
There is a group working on a MMORPG using torque who said they have the ability to load additional terrain blocks on the fly. On their site you can read the log to see some of the progress made on that but I think, and I may be wrong they have stopped development but I can't read Italian so I dont know exactly what it is.
The only thing I see is somehow being able to alter the entire terrain in torque editor and having torque save those changes. Since the engine already repeats the terrain to infinity. I wonder if loading a flat basic terrain and altering it manually would be better than trying to change the whole terrain engine.
Ben Garney kinda pointed me in that direction. My desperate plan is to clone the brains of certain torque members and make a living brain pool. All I will need is some ancient egyptian tools and a moment of thier time to get the needed cells. heh
John H.
#6
Certainly no disrespect to Donovan. Is there anything I'm missing about GORPE? A recent post said he was busy with other stuff and thus I assumed development is stalled.
The current things that still need work in TM (and torque terrain stuff in general)
1. Water Masks
2. Repeating lakes
3. Some hardcoded values like squaresize=8
Anything else you've come across?
I also feel that the terrain editing stuff needs an upgrade for Adventure type games where the entire world needs to be laid out. I'm working on a In-game heightmap editor to make it easier to make big changes. Here's pic (notice the professional looking icons):
02/23/2004 (12:19 pm)
@JohnCertainly no disrespect to Donovan. Is there anything I'm missing about GORPE? A recent post said he was busy with other stuff and thus I assumed development is stalled.
The current things that still need work in TM (and torque terrain stuff in general)
1. Water Masks
2. Repeating lakes
3. Some hardcoded values like squaresize=8
Anything else you've come across?
I also feel that the terrain editing stuff needs an upgrade for Adventure type games where the entire world needs to be laid out. I'm working on a In-game heightmap editor to make it easier to make big changes. Here's pic (notice the professional looking icons):
#7
:-) just jokin' there with U Pascal...
Seriously, I am no programmer and I might sound a bit stupid here but lend me your ears to an idea I've been tossing around lately...
Wouldn't streaming landscape info into the current torque terrain handler be a possible solution?
Instead of changing the whole terrain part of the engine just change the way it loads mapinfo.
This way we could make like several tiny pieces of mission-data and have the engine load and unload them depending on where a player are and where he (or she) is headed.
Maybe this is how the GORPE does things already, I haven't checked it out so don't shoot me for not RTFM please :-)
02/23/2004 (1:38 pm)
Pascal > the icons are ok... the left-right-up-down buttons on the other hand... their alignment makes my eye bleed !!! :-) just jokin' there with U Pascal...
Seriously, I am no programmer and I might sound a bit stupid here but lend me your ears to an idea I've been tossing around lately...
Wouldn't streaming landscape info into the current torque terrain handler be a possible solution?
Instead of changing the whole terrain part of the engine just change the way it loads mapinfo.
This way we could make like several tiny pieces of mission-data and have the engine load and unload them depending on where a player are and where he (or she) is headed.
Maybe this is how the GORPE does things already, I haven't checked it out so don't shoot me for not RTFM please :-)
#8
heh, Np Pascal I cant think of anything else.
But WOW that in-game editor looks good. I agree with your feature request too.
02/23/2004 (3:00 pm)
@ Pascalheh, Np Pascal I cant think of anything else.
But WOW that in-game editor looks good. I agree with your feature request too.
#9
I guess maybe I should expand my statement. I downloaded the TIP from CVS. There were several files that were missing from the compile. So I updated those directories to grab the latest version of the files that had been removed. I compiled the engine and ran it. Showed me a gui but there are no missions. So I did a check out of the mission directory for 1.1. Ran the demo again and it crashed. So I tried checking out a tag I found.
So I was really unable to get it to work. Having said all that if anyone can help that would be great.
As far as me helping improve things I am willing to help as long as its on the RPG side of things.
Regards,
02/23/2004 (3:49 pm)
Johnny,I guess maybe I should expand my statement. I downloaded the TIP from CVS. There were several files that were missing from the compile. So I updated those directories to grab the latest version of the files that had been removed. I compiled the engine and ran it. Showed me a gui but there are no missions. So I did a check out of the mission directory for 1.1. Ran the demo again and it crashed. So I tried checking out a tag I found.
So I was really unable to get it to work. Having said all that if anyone can help that would be great.
As far as me helping improve things I am willing to help as long as its on the RPG side of things.
Regards,
#10
Np Dan your talking to a RPG fan (nut) here. So I know we demand our endless huge worlds to play in. So to keep myself from going nuts over the terrain limitations I been building a system of streamlining our content for the RPG game we want to do.
Technically Iam not the one to expand on anything heh. But I figure if I can help keep fanning the flames someone will break the terrain limits without going around the world to do it. TM is great but Mr. Donovan did say its a heavily modified torque engine its not backwards compatible with any current missions. So I am hoping to get some add-ons or improvements to the current system somehow.
Like I said in another statement I know it will involve playing with the scenegraph and thats something I know takes a compentent programmer (not me heh) to go in there and mess around with.
John H.
02/23/2004 (4:22 pm)
@DanNp Dan your talking to a RPG fan (nut) here. So I know we demand our endless huge worlds to play in. So to keep myself from going nuts over the terrain limitations I been building a system of streamlining our content for the RPG game we want to do.
Technically Iam not the one to expand on anything heh. But I figure if I can help keep fanning the flames someone will break the terrain limits without going around the world to do it. TM is great but Mr. Donovan did say its a heavily modified torque engine its not backwards compatible with any current missions. So I am hoping to get some add-ons or improvements to the current system somehow.
Like I said in another statement I know it will involve playing with the scenegraph and thats something I know takes a compentent programmer (not me heh) to go in there and mess around with.
John H.
#11
The basic torque terrain code has a lot a hardcoded stuff that prevents it from being easily modified to support streaming terrain in, or actually much else than using it the way it is. TerrainManger (once its finished and tidied up) seems to be probably more or less what you are looking for. The only changes it tries to make from the basic torque terrain system is to generalize it so that you can in theory feed any data into it and have the rest of torque completly unaware of what you are doing. All the LOD, QuadTree and Rendering code stay more or less the same. In terms of mission files not being backwards compatible, that's true, but only to the extent that you have to manually add a couple lines to your mission file. That could even be fixed pretty easy (there's an attempt to create a default terrain manger if one doesn't exist -- but that code doesn't seem to be working properly right now).
Anyway what I mean by all that is that I think TM is pretty much a good starting point for all your terrain mods, as otherwise you'll probably end of re-implementing what it already does. I'm using it right now for a 2 block X 2 block island so you probably won't find me adding automatic paging and unlimited terrain in but I'd be more than happy to help get other stuff working.
-Pascal
02/23/2004 (4:53 pm)
@Jorgen + JohnThe basic torque terrain code has a lot a hardcoded stuff that prevents it from being easily modified to support streaming terrain in, or actually much else than using it the way it is. TerrainManger (once its finished and tidied up) seems to be probably more or less what you are looking for. The only changes it tries to make from the basic torque terrain system is to generalize it so that you can in theory feed any data into it and have the rest of torque completly unaware of what you are doing. All the LOD, QuadTree and Rendering code stay more or less the same. In terms of mission files not being backwards compatible, that's true, but only to the extent that you have to manually add a couple lines to your mission file. That could even be fixed pretty easy (there's an attempt to create a default terrain manger if one doesn't exist -- but that code doesn't seem to be working properly right now).
Anyway what I mean by all that is that I think TM is pretty much a good starting point for all your terrain mods, as otherwise you'll probably end of re-implementing what it already does. I'm using it right now for a 2 block X 2 block island so you probably won't find me adding automatic paging and unlimited terrain in but I'd be more than happy to help get other stuff working.
-Pascal
Torque 3D Owner Willbkool
I downloaded the pre-Gorpe TM, and have been checking it out, comparing it to Gorpe, since I don't need all the stuff in Gorpe. My programming skills aren't the best or I would volunteer to help. But it is something I want to implement eventually.