So I was about to click purchase when..

#1 Yeah its a shame that the demo doesn't have atlas2 terrain. Also I reckon there should be a fps mode at the end so you can walk around for a bit.

The demo doesn't have a folder named "terrain_water_demo"?

#2 I imagine Garage Games are waiting for the L3DT plug-in to be finalized before releasing any atlas demos.

Atlas terrain does not come with any editors so using it is a little cumbersome. Basically, you need to create your height maps in an external application (like L3DT) then create one huge texture to apply to it. Then you have to import it into Torque. Once it's in Torque there's no way of modifying it if the need arises.

Mind you, I don't see what's so exciting about an atlas demo. It's just a paging terrain system that allows for huge terrains. It's not going to look much different in terms of visual quality to the standard Geo Terrain that's in Torque at the moment.

Large 3D Terrain Generator

#3 The l3dt plugin does work pretty well. I've used it a few times recently, and was impressed with it.

Regarding Atlas terrain though... I think a well done atlas terrain can look a lot better than legacy terrain.

Pros
- It's a lot faster rendering than legacy terrain
- You can have larger unrepeating terrains.
- You can use multiple atlas instances together in the same scene. People have done caves and island scenarios by exploiting this.
- In the best case scenario atlas looks better than legacy terrain, in addition to being able to accomodate very large terrains

Cons
- No in-game editing
- Inability to cut holes in terrain
- If you elect to use blended terrains rather than Unique terrains then your limited to 4 blend textures in stock TGEA.
- If you elect to use unique terrains then your terrain size is going to be a lot larger than blended terrains, if you want to have the same visual quality.

It should also be noted that if Atlas doesn't meet your expectations you can still use legacy terrain in TGEA. Other than for in-game editing though I'm not sure why you would want to.

#4 So how do you go about editing stuff without the ingame editor.. just manualy edit the mission file?

#5 .

#6 It is not included in the demo. which is a shame because its apparently a really nice "demo" that doesn't come with the "demo".

#7 It is not included in the demo. which is a shame because its apparently a really nice "demo" that doesn't come with the "demo".

#8 You can use the in-game editor to place difs and such, but you can't use the terraformer. Basically the terrain would have to be either generated or edited with a third party program and then imported. L3DT has the atlas plugin for registered owners of it (requires the latest beta of it) and makes that process pretty easy with good results. There are of course other options including HTC, freeworld, terragen, vue etc. Basically if the program can export a heightfield you can import it into atlas... But you won't be able to adjust the terrain in-game it must be done in another program and then imported into a .atlas file.

#9 .

#10 Berserk,
The "ordinary" GEO terrain files are limited in size. Assuming you could re-import them to Atlas, you'd end up with a very small low detail terrain just like TGE GEO terrain, just rendered in Atlas. Worse, GEO terrain uses blended textures only and I'm not aware of a way to export the texture map from GEO to get it into Atlas.

If you are going to build your terrain with the "ordinary" terrain engine you might as well render it with the ordinary terrain engine.

#11 So then atlas isnt really infinite terrain. L3DT has a maximum size limit...

#12 Hmm but I wonder how large of a world it can really handle.

#13

Quote:
So then atlas isnt really infinite terrain. L3DT has a maximum size limit...

Quote:
Hmm but I wonder how large of a world it can really handle.

Quote:
- You can use multiple atlas instances together in the same scene. People have done caves and island scenarios by exploiting this.

Can you use a detail texture on Atlas?

If yes, are you just limited to just one or can you use multiple detail textures for different areas?

If no, how can the texture quality of Atlas be better than that of Geo?

#14 Everything has a size limit. I've been able to get a 64km x 64km non-repeating terraing into Atlas in the past, but it's all going to depend on how you tweak things. Most of the terrains I been using lately on it are using 2 meter block sizes and around 4km x 4km.

Atlas does support detail texturing as of RC1. Out of the box it doesn't support 2 details, but there is code in the private forums to let you add them in pretty easily. I wrote the code on the forums and it's pretty simple (the second detail texture goes over the whole terrain but at a lower frequency than the original). It's pretty easy to make it use the second one on further out distances though, and the first for up close.

There is currently not any code for having different detail textures on different areas. That would be very useful but I coudln't see any easy way to get it in there without major alterations.

#15 @Braedon:
Atlas terrains can be absolutely massive. Since Atlas terrains are paged from disk the limiting factor to terrain size may well be hard disk capacity. See Ben Garney's comments on TSE milestone2 here: www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=8055

#16 Alright I was simply wondering because im planning to use the engine for a world simulation. (yes I have a heightmap of the world...)

EDIT: For those of you interested this part of the link above is what I was looking for.

Biggest terrain theoretically possible in Atlas: 1.8e128 times bigger than the visible universe on a side. It would have more height samples than there are molecules. This is at 1m sample spacing. And, if you had a disk array big enough, it would run in realtime on a high end consumer system.

Anyways thats theoretically possible. The only problem now is finding a art tool that can create something that big. I guess when I buy TGEA ill just have to import the hieghtmap of the world and see if it really can handle it. This will the the true test of atlas terrain.

#17 I've gotten 64x64km terrains working in there no problem. Though, at least with MS4 (haven't tried with RC1 or 1.0) the engine choked sometimes on very large sizes. Not sure if this has improved or not. For the most part though I only need 8km x 8km or less, so it's not an issue.

#18 Im not sure how big 64x64 is. But anyways if that line above about HD size being the only limit isnt true they need to change that. I can just imagine someone buying TGEA for a large scale world and finding its limits.

#19 Braedon,
J.C.'s map was 64kilometers X 64kilometers. That's 4096 square kilometers - 30% larger than the state of Rhode Island. I have never had TGEA choke on me due to having too large a terrain file but it is possible there is a bug with importing super huge Atlas instances. Ben did say "theoretically".

Also note that an Atlas mission can be made of multiple Atlas instances. Instead of trying to make one instance 128km X 128km (5 X the size of Rhode Island) you could use 4 Atlas instances stitched together in your mission file.

You probably don't really want to do this. Unless your level is a barren, and boring, wasteland you will want to populate it with objects, enemies, NPCs, vehicles and other players. The CPU overhead from managing all the AI, collisions, network overhead etc would overwhelm the fastest PC available and bring the game to a grinding halt.

#20 Actually the setting is a baren desolate wasteland for miles upon miles. Transport to major cities is done through launching yourself into space and then dropping at different locations (this is just faked of course xD)

I wouldn't really mind if I have to do instances like what was done in TGE. That would just give me reason to add destructible terrain since instances would reload. But I am sorta hoping for a persistent world :P