L3DT Users' Community

Just want to say you done a great job on the program and the new website.

I been working on a game world over the last few weeks. Here is a couple pic of a test terrain. It is rather crude here because I am still getting use to Blender. Yhe newer ones are much better.

http://www.kaneva.com/publicProfile/pro ... protab=pro

Hi Demi, and welcome to the group.

demi wrote:Just want to say you done a great job on the program and the new website.

Why thankyou. I must say, having a group of people looking over your shoulder is a mighty-strong incentive to get better at whatever you are doing. L3DT wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is today without the all the feedback (and occasional outrageous requests) that I’ve received over the years.

demi wrote:I been working on a game world over the last few weeks. Here is a couple pic of a test terrain.

That's looking pretty darn good for a few weeks work! Did you do the terrain engine yourself?

Cheers,
Aaron.

aaron wrote:
That's looking pretty darn good for a few weeks work! Did you do the terrain engine yourself?

Cheers,
Aaron.

No I used 3LDT. I posted my project in projects. I wrote a terrain generator in 1990. It was a crude noise generator that did 256x256 squares. I just didn't want to spend timeon it so moved on.

I'm sorry I was ambiguous there; I was referring to the terrain rendering engine in your game (as opposed to the terrain generator). How is the 3d-rendering done?

aaron wrote:I'm sorry I was ambiguous there; I was referring to the terrain rendering engine in your game (as opposed to the terrain generator). How is the 3d-rendering done?

The terrain rendering is from the Kaneva Game Studio engine. The terrain is converted to a mesh and rendered as a model. LOD is processed at run time. Makes really nice looking terrain but unlike chunkLOD all the mesh must be hand designed.

I outlined the process to do that here : http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14

I tested the conversion for Torque Shader Engine and could not get very good results because Torque uses chunkLOD. The output was smaller than I wanted it and scaling streched the texture to much. I am going after realistic looking game so I was disapointed with Torque in that respect.


I made some errors on the mesh and texturing. The scene is a 512 square that was imported from the 32768 terrain and textured at x4. It is just the ocean bottom and the whole process took less than and hour. I will soon have a better looking scenes BTW. That one was just a test to determin how to proceed.

Due to the massiveness of the map I need to reduce its size. I am also considering regenerating the map since it also has flaws. Either that or I need to get a method down to batch out the files because 4096 files is going to take me YEARS!


Demi

That's cool how your using the l3dt data. At the moment I've been saving the heightmaps and then importing them into 3ds Max with a script and then exporting them to my own format that works in my engine. The only problem with this method is that the textures don't work properly, but I'm still working on it.