Maps that fit together

[blackFin]

Hi everyone,

I have just a rather short question.
As I am making a game with L3DT-terrain, i'm not sure if there's a way to make some maps with L3DT that "fit together". I cannot do a whole continent with L3dt as one map (sure, L3dt can do this, but my game engine needs some small chunks for database and other things...)
So I need to make some small projects in L3DT with maps that fit seamlessly to another, previously generated map. Is there a way to achieve this?

Oh, there comes another thing in my mind....Is it possible to accellerate L3DT with CUDA technology from Nvidia in some future version? maybe for attributes map generation or texture generation. I have tested this technology for my own texure compressor and it speeds up DDS compression with a factor of 100 and more. I think the parallel stream-processors (logic units) of the G80 Processor could be very helpful when generating terrain or atrributes.

P.S. sorry for my bad english.

greetings,

Fin

P.P.S. Aaron, you are a hero to me. L3DT is such a great tool, and sooo cheap. Almost too cheap in my eyes when I think what can be done with it

[Aaron]

Hi Fin,

There is currently no way to make multiple maps fit together. I did tinker with this a few years back, but the algorithm produced unacceptable artifacts in the heightfield. What I might do in the next few months is release that source code and let other developers have a try.

Otherwise I suggest you generate one really big map containing all the areas you want, and export selected areas as new maps. These selected areas will always fit together, because they were made together.

As for CUDA; I'll have to refactor the code somewhat, but yes, it is on the to-do list (at least for AM generation).

Cheers,
Aaron.

[monks]

Aaron, we'd be very interested to hear how you get on with this over on the TS. This is very exciting (especially as I have a G80:D ). There's still no x64 support for Windows- there are a few folks waiting around for that.
If you need any of this testing just holla.

monks

[Aaron]

Hi Monks,

Sorry, nothing to report yet, and I probably won't have anything for quite a while. In order of optimsations, I'll do yet more multithreading first, then SSE, then CUDA (maybe). The more reading I do on the subject, the more I've realised that CUDA is only applicable to a very narrow band of problems. Somewhat peversely, of all the calculations in L3DT, only the relatively 'fast' light-map generation algorithm might fit into the CUDA niche of massively parallel repetative non-forking operations on long vectors of floating point data. The 'slow' algorithms (erosion, water table flooding, AM generation, TX anti-aliasing) are not readily suitable to CUDA, although I should be able to make some headway here with more multithreading and/or SSE.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

[monks]

Yeah, I think I'm beginning to agree with you about that re: CUDA, certainly for mainstream users. It was always a mainly fun and somewhat extreme proposition, which we just happened to talk about publicly, off ME-DEM. RR has had experience coding co-processors- so that was one of the incentives. I was willing to help fund it (more or less) but there are a number of minor details stalling this. Maybe down the road eh?
Just one map gen seems hardly worth the effort, unless of course you'd relish the rarified/ exotic enviroment

monks

[Nickadimos]

As aaron had said, there is no way in L3DT to just make a huge map out of pieces.

However, there are way to make many different maps and get them to fit together as I have found.

The best way, to me, is to well, use terrain LOL

If I have two areas that I need to fit together, say, a desert region, that leads into a mountainous region, you can always use terrain features like a crevasse or maybe model in a rock formation to hide your gaps.

Other ways of doing this is rivers, underwater in the dim light and the dark blue make it hard to tell things are askew. of course a few well placed plants and some slight tweaking of the edge of the two areas is pertinent.

Try to make your maps Big-to-small. important areas that your players will spend alot of time in make first and a little bigger. Join the big areas first, then fill in the gaps in those areas with smaller chunks that you make later, of course using terrain, boulders, plants, houses, walls WHATEVER to hide the fact your areas aren't perfectly joined.

You really think every area in WOW or something like that is perfect?? think again and look around...

Terry

[dobinz]

I haven't tried it yet as my terrain is still processing (16384x16384). But a new plugin is now included which allows for saving the heightmap as a 3ds mesh. Is it possible to use this plugin to save the terrain as lots of 3ds meshes in mosaic format??? x0y0..x1y0..x2y0...etc etc.

If not then you could do what I previosly did and save it as a .TER mosaic and use another program to convert the files from that into 3ds or whatever format your game engine uses. I use 3ds files as I am using Blitz3d.

I then use the polygon cruncher from mootools here http://www.mootools.com/plugins/us/3dbrowserpro/index.asp#cruncher which when set to batch crunch whilst ignoring the edges can reduce the mesh tiles from 60000+ tris to around 5000 tris whilst keeping all of the data and also making sure there are no cracks appearing between tiles.

[nicethugbert]

I'm curious about something here regarding maps fitting together. Can tiles be made to overlap and exported like this?

[Aaron]

Hi Guys,

My reply in this thread from the 15th of July 2007 still stands; there is currently no way to neatly or automatically stitch multiple maps together.

That said, there is a rudimentary way to merge two or more heightfields using the atMergeMap plugin. However, this does not blend the heightfield edges if they do not already match up (use the 3D editor for that), and nor does it stitch together map types other than heightfields (e.g. textures, etc.)

Best regards,
Aaron.

[demi]

I would look at the engine myself. I know that several engines can page unlimited terrains. Couple free ones are Delta3D and Multiverse. I have put 16 giga-pixel maps in Multiverse without any problem. In fact I had to scale back to 8192x8192 due to size.

Just a suggestion.

Demi

[saroo]

Dear L3DT users,

I am a newbee to all this, so what I am asking probably sounds stupid to you, but I need to ask it anyway..........

I have 4 regions of land joined together in opensim and I would like to cover them with terrain I am going to make in L3DT, I understand that a x = 4, y = 4, 256x256 is the same size a a region, is it just a simple case of setting the size to x=16 y=16 and size 1024 and exporting?
What would be the simplest way of covering the 4 parcels with lovely terrain?

please humour me, I am in need of help with this

yours hopefully

[demi]

I am just guessing here but I think opensim is similar to the old TGE engine. You need to make a terrain that is tileable at 256x256. (export as a bitmap) The engine then rotates the terrain about the zero axis which makes the terrain 1024x1024.