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Animating Terrain Question

by Brian Wilmeth · in Torque Game Engine · 02/21/2006 (9:19 pm) · 2 replies

Hey Forum. My question involved animating my terrain. How can I do this. For example say I want a mountain to grow slowly over a fixed period of time while playing.
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Torque Owner Cisor
#1
02/21/2006 (11:57 pm)
Hmm. Some things to consider:

1) The terrain lightmaps are generated at mission startup, so the grown mountain would have small mountain shadows. IOW, no realtime lighting for the terrain. A few people have attempted various forms of pseudo realtime lighting, but I don't think much came of it. (I may be wrong).
2) There is a deformable terrain resource which should show you how to change the terrain vertices, but I don't think it addressed the lightmap issue. Search for deform. (It was intended for mortar craters and the like).
3) TGE terrain repeats infinitely. The mountain would grow in every repitition. You can switch terrain repetition off, but would need to make several engine changes to do this. Some folk have managed it and there is code for it on the forums.
4) Sometimes its best to do the illogical in TGE. What I mean is: it would probably be easier to not use the terrain for this, but a dts or extremely carefully constructed series of difs. Then the lighting would be realtime and it wouldn't repeat infinitely.

Edit: Spelling.

Torque Owner Jason Farmer
#2
02/22/2006 (2:36 am)
The a terrain deformation resource is here www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=7343

As Cisor says, there's no dynamic lighting. So mountains may grow but they won't cast shadows.
So it's best used where you've got a fairly neutral lighting situation, High sun and ambient light.

However, if you're a C++ guru and you want to build in a dynamic lighting patch, then I for one won't complain ;-)