Terrain planets

Entr0py — 2006-12-07T11:05:14+00:00

I have been experimenting with taking terrain textures and applying them to spheres, to create planet objects. So far I have done this completely with shaders, but I will probably have to do some C++ before it's all said and done. These are the actual terrain textures applied to the planets, just to be clear.

Here is what I want to do:

A sphere is created with a shader representing the terrain object. When the player zooms into the terrain, at some point the sphere is hidden, the terrain becomes unhidden. A raycast is made to find the pixel directly between eyepos and the center of the sphere to find where the camera needs to be hanging above the terrain. At this point the player begins zooming into the actual terrain. Upon zooming out, the reverse should happen, invoking the planet object and hiding the terrain.

Hopefully all this can happen fast enough to make a smooth transition. If not, I can probably use a seperate camera and fade from one to the other to smooth it a bit.

Screenshots of how I am doing so far:

Thursday Jun 24 20:12

Entr0py — 2004-06-24T20:12:08+00:00

It's been a while since I posted a plan.....

I have been working with torque on and off for the past few years learning the art side of things, now that I have that under my belt I have taken it upon myself to learn some scripting and checking out whats going on in the TGE source.

I have been involved in 3 or 4 projects that went up in smoke, so I figure if you want anything done right (or at all) you might as well do them yourself. It might take me 10 years to get anything done this way, but at least I will have gotten SOMETHING done :P

So I am starting simple. I downloaded a copy of James Yong and John Vanderbeck's Minapp and started messing around with how the scripting interfaces with the source code. I also got the MSys/MingW combo and started poking around with source. I used to code muds, so I am proficient with C (although C++ still seems like a foreign language to me)so it's not TOO tough, but still it's quite a struggle. I am primarily a 3D/2D artist and definately NOT a programmer, but hopefully after(or during) this I will be able to produce a few simple games all by myself.

So far I have messed around with GUI's (a lot easier than I thought they would be), server/client communication, and now I am taking a look at how cameras work. At first I thought "Hey I will just learn scripting" But it didn't take me long to figure out I wouldn't get very far without at least LOOKING at the source code. A lot of this is pretty much trial and error, change something here, nudge something there, type this in and see what happens, but it's frustrating and fun at the same time. I am really impressed at what the scripting language can do, it has a lot of depth to it. The scripting alone make C look elementary.

Blog for Entr0py at GarageGames.com

Terrain planets

Thursday Jun 24 20:12