Torque Shader Engine DocumentationCVS Revision Label 0.1.x
| Torque Shader Engine Documentation CVS Revision Label 0.1.x |
Table of Contents
Torque has always been known as an engine with superior support for outdoor scenes. The cornerstone of this support has always been robust terrain engines - from Starsiege to Tribes 2, terrain has been a major component of Torque games.
With this in mind, TSE as of Milestone 2 has two distinct terrain engines. The first, the legacy terrain engine, is simply a port of the TGE fixed function terrain engine, with some optimizations for shader-enabled cards. The second, the Atlas terrain engine is a rewrite from the ground up, designed to support very large visible distances, expansive terrain datasets, and large, unique textures.
Atlas Terrain Engine Features
Atlas uses less than 10% of CPU time per frame to update and render. Compare this with approximately 30% for legacy terrain.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.