Which Terrain?

#1 None, as none supports normalmaps at all.

But for high resolution and squaresize 4 and the like, it sounds like you would want to use Atlas2 Blended (for file size) or Atlas

#2 There are posts on this site that can get normal or parallax maps working for both TGE and TGEA.

#3 If you know how to program you can implement it to everything but out of the box none of it supports it and "drop in" resources for it do not exist as well for them.

#4 Found the links for getting normal mapped terrains working.

Legacy Terrain: http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=54933
Atlas: http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=13582

#5 The L3DT atlas exporter is the only one that does Atlas2 correctly... right?

#6 You can manually input atlas in for atlas2 from a number of exporters. In fact, you probably wouldn't want to use the old atlas for anything. L3DT is the only program I know of that has a direct atlas2 exporter, though if you want to take advantage of terrain shadows you would want to use a blended terrain, which you can't export currently from the l3dt exporter. So manually importing from the command line or using one of the GUIs in the resource area is probably your best bet for getting the most out of atlas.

#7 I hate to be negative, but my experience is that getting an L3DT terrain into Atlas 2 is frustratingly difficult. If the terrain is fairly small (say 1024 x 1024) and uses 1-metre steps, things seems to work OK. Anything more ambitious than that and you can anticipate failed imports with mysterious error messages that tell you nothing useful (and that's the command line tools - the L3DT plugin will just die, and take your L3DT session with it).

You *can* get more interesting terrains into the engine, but please don't think that it will be as simple as generating a landscape in L3DT and then clicking the "Export" button - it will be a lot more painful than that. My experience is that the L3DT export tool is all but useless, and even the command line tools fail quite regularly - they don't crash hard, but they do abort with error messages that are not meaningful unless you understand the detailed ins-and-outs of the engine (which, of course, you don't - why would you, you're meant to be using it, not debugging it!)

I notice that one of the TorqueSchool courses is on TGEA, and covers the topic of getting terrains into the engine. I have no idea whether this course is good or bad, so please don't construe this as a recommendation, but having read the intro to the course, I think I would probably invest in it if I were planning to use Atlas 2 in a new game.

All that said, I do think Atlas 2 is an impressive technology - I just wish one could use it without having to become as familiar with its internals as an engine developer would be. Kind of detracts from the point of using an engine...

#8 @wayne: I assume your recommending using the engine console commands instead of the exporter from l3dt.

I had heard only the l3dt exporter does blended terrains or am I wrong there?

Basically I have heard conflicting opinions on the best way to make terrain.

#9 Wrong, the exporter does exactly no blended it is only capable of unique terrains

#10 Since this post, the following have changed:
-L3DT now supports blended terrains
-Grome has an atlas2 exporter
-Megaterrains are now in TGEA 1.7 (beta), I don't know how this differs to legacy terrain other than it using 4 pieces of terrain to make a big one.

#11 Minor correction to the above:

MegaTerrains allow as many terrain blocks as you want. The example simply demonstrates 4. Of course performance, content within those datablocks, etc., all still matter.

#12 I was testing it with 16 terrains and it was running fairly well for the amount of view distance I was pushing down it. So it is indeed capable of alot more then just the 4 it demonstrates there.

#13 IMO. If you plan to doing any editing of your terrain to fit gameplay... use TerrainBlock. The power of editing in realtime is huge for productivity. Having a several minute turn around in making terrain changes is a killer if your on a deadline.

#14 I wonder if it will take my 1000 x 707km terrain (61x43 blocks of 4096 heightmaps)... Probably not!

#15 Newbie question here. What are these different terrains you're talking about?

Legacy
Atlas
Atlas 2
And now MegaTerrains.


Whats the difference and how do you use them. In the interface all I see is terrain editor.

#16 Legacy is basically the terrain system from TGE.
Atlas is the first implementation of the ChunkLOD terrain system.
Atlas2 is the second implementation of this system with better performance gains.
MegaTerrains are spiffier legacy terrains with the ability to stitch together multiple terrains to create large environments.

#17 What people call 'legacy' is the TerrainBlock terrain. Legacy is a bad word for it. Its just the original Torque terrain implementation that only does 256x256 heightmaps. TerrainBlock terrains can also be edited in realtime within the engine.

The MegaTerrain is an improved version of TerrainBlock. It supports 512x512 heightmaps and stiches the seams of adjacent TerrainBlocks to form what seems like a "mega" terrain.

Atlas is the new terrain system written for TGEA. It uses offline preprocessing to generate a pageable dataset and can support gigantic terrain datasets... only limited by your disk size and processing power. It has the downside that it takes more diskspace and cannot be edited in realtime (at least not yet).

Atlas2 was an improvement on the Atlas system done before TGEA 1.0 was released. Everyone uses Atlas2 now unless you have an old .atlas file that you don't/can't convert over.

#18 Yeah, legacy really isn't a good way to describe it. It has been updated to use clipmaps and stuff... there's actually not a lot of the original code left.

#19 Even less of the original code... maybe none... when i get done with it. ;)

#20 Help, now I'm also confused. Maybe I can ask two questions :-

1) If the new mega terrain does all this stuff does that mean Atlas2 is effectively dead? I don't want to start a war about this, just asking as I'm confused. There now appears to be little use for Atlas, or am I wrong? From the comments above all it seems to offer is (perhaps) some performance advantages in super-large terrains, but there is no performance comparison above between the Atlas and mega.

2) Does the mega-terrain stuff allow different climates to be stitched together and blended at the seams like HTC did? If so, it seems I can stop my seemingly hopeless battle to get Vincent to live up to his promises about HTC and I can just forget it.

Thanks a lot,

Dave.