Initial Atlas Terrain Checkin (Pretty Pictures In Here!)

Hey guys,

I just committed the first public version of the new TSE terrain, codenamed Atlas. This is a fully modern, scalable terrain engine. Check the docs (updated with a whole new chapter :) for details.

This is a private release to our beloved TSE licensees. Congrats, guys, you get first shot at this new toy. :) We'll be rolling out a full launch of Milestone 2 - this was the last piece - next week when we all get back from Memorial Day of Weekend. I'd appreciate it ever so much if you'd keep on the quiet side about this until then!

The toolchain is currently a bit on the basic side. A fuller toolchain will be rolled out as part of MS3.

Please take a moment to give it a try. Feedback is welcome - post it here, in a new thread on this forum, or mail it to me. There's a lot more work to be done, but this represents a basic usable point for people to work from. :)

You can get this release by doing a CVS update, of course.

And finally... A rundown on the features:

Lightweight CPU Usage
Atlas uses less than 10% of CPU time per frame to update and render. Compare this with approximately 30% for legacy terrain.

Massive Landscapes
Supports landscapes of arbitrary size, bounded only by disk space. The current system supports approximately 10 quinquagintillion (or ten thousand quintillion vigintillion for those Brits in the audience, or 10154 chunks on the base level).

Vast View Distances
Can quickly render unlimited view distances, bounded only by the working range of the video card's Z-Buffer. Atlas can achieve 100+ fps on a midrange Radeon, with a view distance of approximately 4,000 meters. The legacy terrain is not even capable of rendering this view distance by default!

Unique Textures
Atlas supports a single massive texture for your entire terrain! Every texel is unique. Support for extremely large textures (in excess of 32,768 by 32,768 pixels) on all hardware. Of course, all this is streamed, so you only pay memory cost for the texture detail near you. A future release will support on-the-fly texture blending like the legacy terrain.

Streaming Data
Data is streamed from the disc as needed, so you can have very large terrains without exceeding your memory. Both geometry and texture data are loaded on the fly.

Accurate Collision
What is rendered is what is collided against, so you get full interaction support for anything Atlas can render - overhangs, gaps, ditches, and so on. As the toolset for this engine matures, it will be possible to actually create such terrains. But the runtime as of now supports this sort of topology.

Compressed Textures
Atlas fully supports industry-standard DXT texture compression. It compresses offline for maximum quality, pregenerates mipmaps for minimal CPU usage at runtime, then streams it directly into GPU memory.

Ok, I'm going to a party. I'll be back online later tonight to check up on things, and will be around during the weekend as well. Thanks for being so patient with me! :)