hmm, can you do this?

[robert]

I was just reading the page on choosing map size.

Since i want to model contents for a MMO. I want a large area (100km...)
so i was wondering can i do a map that is say 100m res and choose 8k size. This would render at a reasonable speed.

Then export a mosaic of the world with chunks sized about 20km. Then feed a single mosaic tile back into l3dT and have it render a detailed map of that area at the higher resolution?

In the end i need to get the height maps into Big World and it can stream chunks of terrain in and out of memory.

Anyway is it possible to do this, If so then how.. still a noob to all of this.

[Telarus]

The problem you will run into is that once you've added a "detail pass" to each "chunk" the edges are no longer going to line up (L3DT doesn't have the bordering info to run the design map algorithms to make this theoretical match).

I've been mulling this myself.

[demi]

I don't understand why folks have to get these worlds so damn big. LOL


I was the same way so I understand that you don't understand what a large world is. Currently I have a world in BigWorlds engine that is 640 blocks x 512 blocks The hortizonal resolution is .7125 meters per division (was a major project to get the scale correct BTW). That is 81920 pixels x 65536 pixels. It takes over four hours to cross the world in the x direction. It is so unrealisticly big that for a commercial game it is probably not going to wash because it takes a whopping 56 giga bytes witht eh texturing masks.

Just saying...

Demi


Edit:

After re-reading what you asked I believe this may be of use to you.

First off – Bigworlds has issues with large worlds so you need to mosaic the world off into different spaces. However, I work on one map to build the world and am writing a exporter for BWT that reads the world map and generates a mosaic spaces. The program is not complete at this writing because I decided to complete the other parts of the project and wait for the 2.1 release in case they change the terrain.

With that said – I wanted to get as close to realistic in size and scale that I could with L3DT and BWT. I selected the mid level detail of 128 pixels per 100 meters in BWT which is a .7125 meter per division. I created a 16 Giga-pixel design map at 1 meter per division so I could get some continental landmasses. Once I had a decent looking continent I selected it and saved it to a new layer. I resized this layer to a rough design of 1/8th the final map size (10240 x 8192) and the mosaic size of 1024. After generating the map at this size I then used the import design map function in L3DT and set the input read at 2 and output at 16 which makes a 8192 block at 1 meter per division. I had 64 tiles to process but they go a lot faster than L3DT because they are not mosaic.

With L3DT it is possible to generate a world size 16 time greater than 16 Giga-pixels using this method but the time involved and hard disk space required is beyond ones time or space.

Hope that helps ya..