Game engines that support max heightfield size?

[lmaceleighton]

Honestly if you just want a really BIG world and your not making an MMO then Torque 3D is probably the way to go, as right now I can make a world easily the size of any WOW continent. This includes all the different zones, and I have made terrain with 10-16 materials on each.... Although Multiverse is a great engine and is free too. I used it my MMO Class at DeVry. From a design standpoint what you should do is plan your game out 100% on paper first before you ever buy any software. Make sure you have as much planned out as you can, right down to every detail you can think of. This way when you buy the engine you need you know how big exactly you want for terrain, and what type of features you want, this makes the decision of the game engine easier.

@Demi
Sorry I was a bit misleading in my Post it wasn't Multiverse Ive never heard of Ive been a dev in their community from the start(although with college not very active), I just wanted to make sure there was some talk about how the terrain in a world that size worked.
Esenthel is an interesting engine that I may give a try if I ever have access to a team that large and commited. So far I have worked for 4 different companies, a few very small, the other went belly-up while making an MMO for a major franchise, glad to see it is possible to get somthing closer to BIGWORLD tech.

[wysardry]

Unless Torque 3D has drastically changed since version 1.0, it cannot handle terrains anywhere near 131,072 pixels across (and neither can TGE or TGEA).

The terrain in WoW is about 9 miles or 14.5 kilometres across. It would need to have elevation markers every 9 centimetres or so to use a heightmap as large as L3DT Pro can produce.

To give you some sense of the scale of terrain I'm asking about, take a look at this comparison of large game worlds.

The largest map shown visually is 400 square miles. I'm looking to create one with over 60,000 square miles of land area.

I haven't mapped it all out yet, because at this point I don't know if the engine I end up using has restrictions on size and/or shape of heightmaps. For example, some require them to be square and a power of 2.

With there being so few engines that support really large terrains, I don't want to be so exact in my requirements that I cannot find anything suitable to use.

[demi]

I don't know if the prices for Ethenthel changed, but the site currently has licenses for 0, 150, 1000, 10,000 and 390,000 USD. It is only the latter which includes the engine source code.

I cannot say at this point whether I will definitely need the source code, but I can see that I might need to make changes, and 390K is definitely outside my budget.

$10,000 for the engine source. $390K for all editors game source and shaders. IMO if you need to go that route then get Ogre or Crystalspace and write your own. As a note, I used CS for better part of 3 years. Much has improved but They still do not have a paging landscape plugin so you will have to write your own. There is no editor to support terrains as far as I know in CS so you can not directly change the terrain..

[demi]

@Demi
Sorry I was a bit misleading in my Post it wasn't Multiverse Ive never heard of Ive been a dev in their community from the start(although with college not very active), I just wanted to make sure there was some talk about how the terrain in a world that size worked.
Esenthel is an interesting engine that I may give a try if I ever have access to a team that large and commited. So far I have worked for 4 different companies, a few very small, the other went belly-up while making an MMO for a major franchise, glad to see it is possible to get somthing closer to BIGWORLD tech.

AH OK. You probably see my posts on the mv Forums then.

I waited for a new update until April of this year. When it became apparent that there was not going to be a new update, I bailed and started looking for a new engine.

Since I made this decision I think it is primary reason why my team fell apart.

After study of several engines and running tests I settled for Esenthel. I got a indie license for Netdog but was kind of bummed when the team fell apart so have not done much with it. Netdog will interface well since it is C++ package.

I have been doing world editing and painting the landscape. If you want I will put a few pics up on coppermine (here) or my site so you can see the editor and game engine in action. I think it is an impressive engine.

Demi

[lmaceleighton]

I would like to see more. Honestly the editor is very confusing on first glance. I really wouldn't want to have this be my first engine so far. However the result are hard to argue with! :O)

[Telarus]

This has been an informative thread, thanks everybody.

Has anyone used Unity http://unity3d.com/?? My school has recently decided to teach with it.

I haven't used it yet, but this is the terrain editor - http://unity3d.com/support/resources/unity-extensions/terrain-toolkit

[demi]

When I first got Esenthel I put the map in at 16384x16384 It was made in L3DT at 32768x32768 with 2 meter resolution. The first run through it was just so huge I reduced it to 8192x8192. I tested again and decided to reduce it some more so I was mistaken on the size. It is 4096x4096 or -63 to +62 blocks.

The area I am currently working on is in the rectangle of http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/Whren_map.jpg

Give you two screens form different angles.

http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/shot.jpg was done several days ago and http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/current.jpg is what I painted last night.


Took a few screens in game.

From in heken.

http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/7.jpg

http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/8.jpg

Out near the desert.

http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/10.jpg

http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/11.jpg

Out in the desert.

http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/15.jpg

http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/16.jpg

http://www.whrenonline.com/Screens/17.jpg

Like I said, I haven't worked on it much since June. Took all my stuff off the web in July so not videos on utube now. Maybe I will put up a new one soon.


@Telarus

I have tested Unity it is a nice engine but is zone based. I could not get a terrain in it very easy.

FYI, I have tested just about every free engine and some not free engines looking for that one that can do unlimited terrains and seamless worlds.

Demi

[nod114]

hey would any of you guys no how much TGEA can handle ? and even if you cant make massive maps you could just make multiple maps for a mmo right?

[wysardry]

$10,000 for the engine source. $390K for all editors game source and shaders.

That isn't the way their purchase page reads.

According to that, $10,000 gives you the source codes for Game::Chr, SockAddr, Socket, Converter Tool. $390,000 gives you access to the source for the Engine, Renderer, Shaders, Tools and all other Codes.

IMO if you need to go that route then get Ogre or Crystalspace and write your own. As a note, I used CS for better part of 3 years. Much has improved but They still do not have a paging landscape plugin so you will have to write your own. There is no editor to support terrains as far as I know in CS so you can not directly change the terrain..

I'm not sure when you last used Crystal Space, but their features list and documentation mention terrain and object paging/streaming. Maps can be divided into cells, so it should be possible to use a third party terrain editor to modify each individual height map, as long as you steer clear of the edges.

[Rofar]

I have experience with Esenthel and in my opinion, if I ever felt the need to have all that source code, I would be better off coding my own engine. There should be no reason to have to get into the guts of the engine. If the engine is that far from suiting your needs, then it's probably not the right choice for you.

[wysardry]

I don't own a crystal ball, so I can't know whether I will need the source code at some point in the future. Lots of things could happen during the time it would take to make such a huge game.

The developer may stop updating the engine so that it eventually becomes incompatible with whatever hardware and software most people are using by the time I'm done, it may turn out to have some obscure bug that only affects games with very large terrains or I may just not realise yet that I need a specific feature.

[demi]

$10,000 for the engine source. $390K for all editors game source and shaders.

That isn't the way their purchase page reads.

According to that, $10,000 gives you the source codes for Game::Chr, SockAddr, Socket, Converter Tool. $390,000 gives you access to the source for the Engine, Renderer, Shaders, Tools and all other Codes.

IMO if you need to go that route then get Ogre or Crystalspace and write your own. As a note, I used CS for better part of 3 years. Much has improved but They still do not have a paging landscape plugin so you will have to write your own. There is no editor to support terrains as far as I know in CS so you can not directly change the terrain..

I'm not sure when you last used Crystal Space, but their features list and documentation mention terrain and object paging/streaming. Maps can be divided into cells, so it should be possible to use a third party terrain editor to modify each individual height map, as long as you steer clear of the edges.

Humm. Guess he changed the licensing. Sorry I missed that.


Last release of CS I played with was 1.5.

If you haven't downloaded and compiled it yet, give it a go.

Like I said they are making improvements.

If you need a editor there is a http://wiki.kyanite-studios.org/doku.php?id=ca:start

Not sure that team is still working on it anymore. Runs under python.

As for me. I have settled on the engine I plan to use. I don't need source to build with it. I would rather have a means to rapidly develop the game instead of messing with a game engines and game editors.

[nod114]

what if you moble the stuff small to begin with and your characters small to begin with. like in blender? your not scaling anything down if it is already modeled to be that small. this would pry work but i would suggest low poly models if this is possible that is lol

[Aaron]

Hi Nod114,

It makes no difference. If we ignore precision issues, the size or scaling of the objects count for very little. What really counts, in terms of visual appeal and in terms of performance requirements, is the polycount. If you're not changing the polycount, your not making a difference*.

Please feel free to try though, and let us know how it goes.

Cheers,
Aaron.

* To a first approximation; insert usual disclaimers and exceptions here.

[nod114]

o ok i get it