Adding features to Legacy terrain - $250-$300
by Adam Beer · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 12/31/2007 (8:46 pm) · 25 replies
I am in need of someone to add a few things to the Legacy terrain engine. Firstly, please dont tell me to use atlas because it is not developed enough for me to use. Mainly, I want to make the terrain more detailed. What I mean by this is I want to have Legacy have more polygons/verts. When you want to make a hill and you select your smallest brush (1x1) and move it around, it jumps quite a few units when moving to a different position. I want to do this because I want to use the Terrain Deform resource here:
http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=13884
When you create a deformer object, the crater it creates is not smooth and you can clearly see the polygons on the terrain. I want to see smooth craters and not have noticeable polygons. Also, of course I want the terrain deformer resource to work with this new terrain also.
Next, I would like support for larger heightmap support (1024px) and larger textures (512px). There is a problem with lighting the terrain when you have lots of interiors, and I think the error is "Stack around the variable 'sides' was corrupted" and it crashes. I would like that fixed. I think there is something you change in sceneGraph/shadowVolumeBSP.cpp I just dont know what. And finally, It would be nice if the terrain supported paging. My game requires semi far view distances. Im not talking like 50km view distance, the normal view distance for legacy I think is ~800 I would like to be able to see 3000 max with high framerates. I am not a programmer so this kind of stuff is way out of my league and I hope someone is willing to help me. I will be willing to pay $250-$300 to anyone who can get all these ideas working for me. My contact info is as follows:
MSN: adam_labat@hotmail.com
Email: adam@heartofthebattle.com
If anyone is interested please contact me. I am looking forward to anyone responses.
PS: I would be willing to release the results as a resource if all works out well. I know some of these problems have been around for a while. Cheers. =)
Edit: Happy new year.
http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=13884
When you create a deformer object, the crater it creates is not smooth and you can clearly see the polygons on the terrain. I want to see smooth craters and not have noticeable polygons. Also, of course I want the terrain deformer resource to work with this new terrain also.
Next, I would like support for larger heightmap support (1024px) and larger textures (512px). There is a problem with lighting the terrain when you have lots of interiors, and I think the error is "Stack around the variable 'sides' was corrupted" and it crashes. I would like that fixed. I think there is something you change in sceneGraph/shadowVolumeBSP.cpp I just dont know what. And finally, It would be nice if the terrain supported paging. My game requires semi far view distances. Im not talking like 50km view distance, the normal view distance for legacy I think is ~800 I would like to be able to see 3000 max with high framerates. I am not a programmer so this kind of stuff is way out of my league and I hope someone is willing to help me. I will be willing to pay $250-$300 to anyone who can get all these ideas working for me. My contact info is as follows:
MSN: adam_labat@hotmail.com
Email: adam@heartofthebattle.com
If anyone is interested please contact me. I am looking forward to anyone responses.
PS: I would be willing to release the results as a resource if all works out well. I know some of these problems have been around for a while. Cheers. =)
Edit: Happy new year.
About the author
Adam is the owner of Ignition Games, an indie game and software development company.
#22
My main issue was with the grid size, but this can be adjusted. (Did I miss something in the thread? I didn't see any mention of this). If you go into your .mis file you can set the squareSize from 8 to 4 without any trouble--this effectively doubles the density of your terrain. If you go from 4 to 2 you'll need to make some changes either to a) allow for larger terrain allocations (the defaults assume you won't exceed ~3mb in terrain vertices) or b) to the far clip distance so it doesn't try and render so much terrain or c) to the terrain "screenError" so that it performs less detailing at distance from the camera. I haven't tried setting the squareSize to 1 yet but I imagine it'll just mean more tweaking with a, b and c.
Personally I wouldn't want to go as far as squareSize=1, that's an insane amount of data, and my game is mostly flat anyways. I wouldn't want to do that without some kind of poly-optimizer.
As to the texture size limitations, I think it would be easier to add support for more textures than it would be to add support for larger ones. I think the data format supports up to 16 textures per terrain chunk, right?
01/27/2008 (2:20 pm)
When I first started taking a serious look at terrain I had many of the same complaints mentioned above.. Grid size was too large, textures were too small, no clean interpolation between heights, etc..My main issue was with the grid size, but this can be adjusted. (Did I miss something in the thread? I didn't see any mention of this). If you go into your .mis file you can set the squareSize from 8 to 4 without any trouble--this effectively doubles the density of your terrain. If you go from 4 to 2 you'll need to make some changes either to a) allow for larger terrain allocations (the defaults assume you won't exceed ~3mb in terrain vertices) or b) to the far clip distance so it doesn't try and render so much terrain or c) to the terrain "screenError" so that it performs less detailing at distance from the camera. I haven't tried setting the squareSize to 1 yet but I imagine it'll just mean more tweaking with a, b and c.
Personally I wouldn't want to go as far as squareSize=1, that's an insane amount of data, and my game is mostly flat anyways. I wouldn't want to do that without some kind of poly-optimizer.
As to the texture size limitations, I think it would be easier to add support for more textures than it would be to add support for larger ones. I think the data format supports up to 16 textures per terrain chunk, right?
#23
As for squareSize, that doesn't work fully in TGEA. I don't know how the terrain code works in this regard, but culling of faces gets very odd when you change the square size, and as a result you'll get jittering reflections on water which is close to the terrain. Unless this changed recently, of course. Go beneath the terrain and look up, change square sizes and you'll notice how the behaviour changes.
01/27/2008 (4:22 pm)
Can we please be specific to what version of Torque we're discussing here? There's no such thing as a texture limitation (other than what the technology limits) on TGEA legacy terrain. Resolution, that is.As for squareSize, that doesn't work fully in TGEA. I don't know how the terrain code works in this regard, but culling of faces gets very odd when you change the square size, and as a result you'll get jittering reflections on water which is close to the terrain. Unless this changed recently, of course. Go beneath the terrain and look up, change square sizes and you'll notice how the behaviour changes.
#24
01/27/2008 (4:26 pm)
It looks like the next TGEA update fixes all of the problems here. Unless the update doesnt turn out to what it sounds like, doing this is pointless. 
#25
01/27/2008 (10:31 pm)
Yeah. new update will include what we want anyway. so i retract my offer
Torque 3D Owner Phil Carlisle
TGE's terrain is nigh on unreadable code wise.
TGEA's terrain is night on unusable editor wise.
Start again, implement the same interface for the editor so that the in-game editing works properly, but make the implementation more code friendly. Possibly even port a geo-mip implementation from another engine?
Seriously, its more pain hacking the current one than just implementing something new.
But I'd highly recommend the shader path, forget TGE.