Plan for Ben Garney

The new TSE terrain is out! TSE Milestone 2 is done! It's ready for you to play with, too. There are docs, there are some basic tools, there are comments in the source code. It runs fast and light. It supports background loading via a loader thread. It lets you put whatever texture you want, at whatever size you want, on the terrain. You can have huge viewable distances at high framerates, too (although it might be a bit tricky to fill all that space).

The new terrain technology is called Atlas. We didn't think that "newterrain" would be a very durable name, and Jay turned a funny color when I suggested we call it "chunk"... :P

The Atlas runtime supports a lot of really cool things, which we'll be rolling out in the coming TSE milestones. There are also a couple of major new features planned, like bringing back the texture blender (of course, vastly improved from its last incarnation :), and maybe even support for things like overhangs, roads, user editable geometry...

All of this is in CVS, as are the updated docs and a test terrain. There are some real terrains you can play with available for download (see docs), as well as the tools to generate your own from source media. I've also been working with John Vanderbeck on a texture generator to allow you to generate super-big, super-detailed textures easily. This will be going into CVS pretty soon here; right now the beta can be found on the TSE private forums.

You might be curious about the image to the right. It's a mosaic of a bunch of screenshots I've taken over the course of Atlas development - the top 10% of about 800 shots. All the way from the first tottering polygons, a bunch of failed approaches, on to some really pretty stuff later on. Take a look; it's hosted on my flickr account, the Atlas Terrain set. Lots of cool stuff there.

Some fun facts about Atlas:

Development time to date: A year of me doing about half-time work on it.
Number of complete rewrites to date: 10. The first three were on a computer that killed its harddrive on me. After that I kept it in source control. Never code without using source control, and always back up on another computer!
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.
Framerate on a Radeon 9700 Mobile: 100fps +, even while paging with a super slow hard drive.
Cards it can run on: Anything that supports pixel shader 1.1 or higher.

I'm really excited to see how TSE is going to mature over the course of Milestone 3. It's "there" in terms of being able to make games with it - there are two X-Box titles shipping or soon to ship based on it, and a lot of other cool stuff coming. I even spent a little time with it prototyping some gameplay... a real blast to work with. :) It's not "100%" but as far as being able to DO things with it - you definitely can.

And, wanted to say, that working on TSE with Brian and the awesome community here has been a real privilege. Not that I'm planning on stopping anytime soon, but I want to give some props. ;) We've gotten a bunch of new interns here at GG, too, including Justin Dujardin, Nathan Hramits (get a profile :P), and Adam Degrandis. And soon, we'll have Chemeleon here, too. :)

So, now that I'm done with Atlas/TSE for the moment, I'm looking forward to putting in a LOT of time on TGE 1.4 and TDN. I'm hoping to get TDN out to the associates in the very near future, so we can get it cooking for the whole community to experience. 1.4 RC2 has been percolating for a while in SVN, and I'm looking forward to polishing it up and getting it out into CVS so the community can pound on it and we can get the final release done.

There'll be press releases and a really cool video coming out soon to more formally launch MS2.

Phew. Ok, time to get back to work. ;)