L3DT-2-3D Game Studio A7

[DeathTwister]

Hay guys,

Long time no see. Well for long time I did not need to post as I had all the terrains I could use for TGE and TGEA, but then we changed engines of which I will not go into here, but it did mean I needed to hit the L3DT website again hahaha to find what I needed.

Ok, at first I posted here looking for peoples that knew the engine but no go. Then I did a more in depth search for tuts and L3DT in particular and found a wonderful resources, but not exactly accurate at:
http://www.coniserver.net/wiki/index.php/How_to_create_terrains_using_L3DT
and you do not need to log in to do the see the tutorial. Also there is a free 30 day trail version of the engine if you want to take the time to play with it and see what it can don and download the demos (most impressive by the way) to see if it is your cup of tea. But if you have been frustrated with your engine for any reason, well then maybe you should go check this out. We are in 7th heaven so far.
There main website is at: http://www.3dgamestudio.com/
if you want to check em out more and download the demos.

OK so I am not going to go into all the corrections I did right now to the tutorial as the version of L3DT and the version of the video game engine art different so I had to convert and find out where the new buttons were and so forth, but all in all I got my first real good terrain in so sweetly is was almost sinful. Not at all like Torque where I tore my hair out for weeks with buggy interfaces and math I did not understand as an artist. If any of you have a hard time figuring it out, Give a holler. But also look at the post I did on Ping's in L3DT and change the export of the attributes map to true from false and you be good to go in L3DT for the tutorial. I am still learning, but I am a tad ahead of you guys, unless some are doing it now and using GS A7? if so speak up /winks....
OK here are some screens from the different editors, and then later will explain more. But have a few days of hard work then will post I hope a whole level for ya'll to play in, maybe. At least soon hehehehehe, just for fun you understand, and maybe kill one or 2 things if we can get it together fast as we have more then enough media hahaha to work with. KK here are some screens.
The first screen is from MED the Modeler that you actually bring the files in from L3DT.



The second screen is from WED the Main Level Editor and staging area where you put it all together.



The Third Screen is of after I have run the script in WED and am viewing it as a level before I put anything else into it. So no Skies or Shaders on the terrain or water, or building and trees, well you get the idea.../beams a smile But it is a beginning for me with this engine so I am having a ton of fun so far. Very well put together piece of software so far and very few bugs if any we have found. Even better right????? /winks.



So anywho this is what I have been doing the last 2 weeks is learning new software as the old stuff just didn't cut it at all, so broke down and spent some money, but so far so very well worth it.

Can't wait to make some 32 K maps now, just have to decide what ones first ROTFL dang this going to be crazy for a while.

Also I need to go do the road tutorials and then see how I can make that all work in the engine as I only get 4 textures layers, height map, RGB map (attributes), and LM map (Shadows). I think in the base terrain, but then there are layering I can do, just not got that far yet in all the docs, but I will.....KK have fun all and I am around now, so give a shout if needed. And of course the textures used in the map, derr...lol...KK have fun guys

I am back to work after a short break, need to work on Skies next and see if we can get a .exe to download and test of a simple level with the terrain file. Will post here when we do for those interested.

DT

[Atlantis]

How do you get your terrain to come in a decent size? I've scaled my terrain in MED but then the textures look blurry and stretched.

How do you get your terrain to come in large so you can make larger levels like in "Far Cry" outdoors or like some of the mmo's?

Do you have a method or instructions you'd be willing to share? I know how to use L3DT, it's just getting a large size terrain into A7 with textures that look good.

How can I get the mountains produced in L3DT to actually be large mountains that are way larger than you in A7?

Thanks.

[DeathTwister]

Hay all,

Some notes from a madman /winks

Sorry I been dark, but trying to get some deadlines down now that I am feeling a bit better.

How do you get your terrain to come in a decent size? I've scaled my terrain in MED but then the textures look blurry and stretched.

How do you get your terrain to come in large so you can make larger levels like in "Far Cry" outdoors or like some of the mmo's?

Do you have a method or instructions you'd be willing to share? I know how to use L3DT, it's just getting a large size terrain into A7 with textures that look good.

How can I get the mountains produced in L3DT to actually be large mountains that are way larger than you in A7?

1. Well first I brought them in using WED, then exported them to MED and used the size toll, as one (Quant) is one inch, I got the Calculator out and did the math for a 4.5 square miles of level as if you try that in WED it will use a huge amount of CPU resources and we learned that this way was a much less CPU hit. Now I noticed a bit when at ground level it was a bit bleary, but I think if you reload your map it should be fine. I have also noticed that is you resize stuff in MED or WED that the textures do not resize with the mesh/BSP's so you may want to resize first before you add any Textures and Wads to it all I am finding.

2. Well I brought in a small map like I said but if you use a 32m or 64m and bring it in, then resize in MED like I said for 400 square miles, then add the textures, you should be fine I would think. But remember I am just learning all this like you so if it don't quit work right /shrugs well tweak it is all I can suggest, but let me know if you find more stuff then this and I will do the same /smiles.

3. Well bro this is about all I know so far, but I can and will post here as I find better info if you will do the same? that would be hella cool. Together we can build em better lol. I am sure there are better ways to do this stuff, I just have not found them all yet, and A7 is brand new and no docks on any of this stuff yet. And really nothing on terrains at all ATM.

4. Well when you import them into WED make sure you when tweaking the importer make sure the mountains are higher then normally would be so after you stretch the terrain out in MED you will still have mountains that are high enough, or that is what I was going to do to solve that little part I was thinking, so if you do it before me, let me know how it comes out, OK? /smiles.

Remember it is always in the Tweaking that gets the best results, always /winks,,,it may drive ya crazy, but that is how I find it gets done best hahahh.

OK hope that helps some? I will add as I go, but right now I am working on getting all the buildings I made in Constructor for the TGE and TGEA engine projects transfered to WED and MED and into the new engine, so if I a bit slow to respond it is only because I am swamped with work right now, then back to terrains in a few days or so I promise.

OH FYI: the scaling between the 2 engines are not even close. You will need to scale down to with your characters.
0.500 0.500 0.500 two times for your Characters, and for some reason the buildings:
0.500 0.500 0.500
then
1.200 1.200 1.200
then
0.500 0.500 0.500
0.500 0.500 0.500
Equals=right scaling for engine.
And you are at the right scaling for the engine if you were using TGE or TGEA from Garage games. Just in case anyone needed to know.

DT

[Atlantis]

The problem with using the method you mentioned above from the Wiki is that you are only allowed 3 textures - sand, rock, and grass. No offense to the person that made http://img503.imageshack.us/my.php?image=78613382wq7.jpg but it's more of a crit on the method that A7 uses. You need more textures on a terrain than that.

This person that made the above terrain did a wonderful job on a vegetation programme. http://www.coniserver.net/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=212822&page=1 And he was able to get some nice hills on his terrain. CBabe is quite small when you open the WED file.

Next gen games allow you to use much more than that and you can use about 7-9 textues per grid or block. So my beach is going to look much different than my mountains. Not so with this method.

I wish there was a way we could keep and use the L3DT textures and not have them blur when it gets to WED.

I think I'm going to take a look at Loopix Mysty Moods http://www.loopix-project.com/ again and just study what he did with his textures. There is also a vehicle demo http://server.conitec.net/down/cardemo.zip and also look in your A7 "Projects" folder. On this one you can drive a car around a rather large map. I think I'll go back and study that one too. There has to be a way they are getting more textures on those terrains than just 3.

I've also tried bringing in my terrain as .x but the collision is not good with it.

~~~

Do you have your terrain textures show up in WED or are the whole thing light blue? On the car demo in your projects folder, you can see your terrain textures and the file is a hmp.

Plane01.hmp is in the Templates/Levels folder. The skin is only a 1024x2048 and skin0 is a colour texture and NOT that RGB one. The script running on it is ffp_terr_detail.

When you run the demo, the terrain is blurry. Wouldn't work for first person perspective.

Conclusion: It looks like you're stuck with two choices here. 1. Not blurred textures but you can only use 3. 2. Tons of textures but they are blurry.

[Atlantis]

As you see by the date, it's been days later. I've tried Method 1 listed below and have been thinking through another way (Method 2) that I haven't tried yet.

The only way you are going to get clear textures is to use the RGB method like you listed above in the Wiki link. The huge drawback: 3-4 textures per terrain.

When the player goes out on the beach, I want him to see beach sand and when he goes out in the mountains, I don't want him to see beach sand, but rock and mud. I want his landscape to be different when he goes inland and then walks to the ocean and then up to the mountains.

I've worked on a script that should allow you to use several different terrain types but you can only assign one type of terrain per block.

These are the blocks that I have seperated out for the script. I have ocean/desert (with 3 different sand textures), beach (which has sand, grass sand mixed and grass), hills (which is different type grass and a mud or dirt), mountain (which is grass and rock textures) and snow (which is snow, snow and grass mixed). I have also included caves and it has its own set of textures.

Method 1.
Create these terrain pieces in blocks and shape the blocks so they can fit like puzzle pieces. If you shape these pieces correctly, you can reuse them and make different terrain shapes using the same pieces. If you've ever used the Elder Scrolls Construction set for Morrowind, you'll be familiar with this type method. Terrain "snaps" nicely together in WED. When making these pieces, I keep the edges flat so the terrain will always line up. These can easily be "camouflaged" by using models like rocks and automatic grass like "Seed-It".
Drawbacks
1 - It's rather difficult to get the odd shapes like slopes to go from the ocean to beach to fit on the two sides of the slope. You have the ocean and it has to slope up to the beach - all around the island. Making those fit together is a problem I'm running into. Also, the way the land curves, small islands, etc makes it hard to create a few pieces to give quite a bit of variety.
2 - Seams. But doesn't even the commercial engine show seams and terrain issues? The seams for this would be block, but also if you added a mountain, there would be seams around that where it came up through the terrain.

Method 2.
Use the same as above, except don't create them as blocks that should fit together, but create them as mounds or hills (some gradual so as to be a little flatter so you can put houses on it). Each terrain type hill will build on itself to create your terrain. You have a large ocean piece which is your base. Then you take a much much smaller hill of sand and bring that in. You can add more hills of sand to make a larger sand area or add the beach set to create your beach area. Picture the concentric circles made by L3DT in one of the "builds" that it does.
Drawbacks
1 - This might end up with a few more polies. The flat ocean piece that is "under the ground" is polies that the player will never see. The hill mesh that you want to bring in can be raised or lower for height, but if it's lower, you have all that mesh under neath that is being rendered but is not needed or seen.
2 - Seams again. These seams would be more like the contour and not block seams. I think this will be perhaps less annoying than seeing the "block" seam that is seen in most commercial games.
3 - Textures between 2 different blocks. I've tried to set my textures so the textures will match up between two different block sets. Like having the sand on the beach be the same sand on the ocean so the two pieces will come together.

I've kind of tested out Method 1 as I've completed 3 beach sets. I think it's going to be too difficult to set up and use. I think I'm going to try out Method 2 and see how that comes together and what kind of framerate I'm going to end up with.
~~~~~~~~~

.mdl7 vs .hmp

.mld7
Pros
1 - you can actually see the terrain colours
2 - you can delete faces so you can add in a cave that would actually go underground without a level load
Cons
1 - I have found some collision issues with going up hills if you use .mdl

.hmp
Pros
1 - I think it has better collision than .mdl
Cons
1 - you can't see your terrain to place your items on it. If you have a trail, you can't see it to place your fence.
~~~
PS. I'll be happy to share with you whatever I come up with. If I'm happy with it, then I'll probably put it up in user contributions. I already have the textures done and seamless and have permission to share them with the group as I have a membership to a texture site.

[DeathTwister]

Wow lots of info all to the good bro,

Hay sorry I have not gotten back to ya on the last post, but I have been swamped with other areas of the A7 engine myself and was starting to get back around to the terrain issues when I saw this one come in a bit ago.

I have a idea or 2 I want to try to the terrain Textures before I post again as I may or may not have a work around.
But I have also found bugs I think in many areas of this engine I need to post on their website first before I post here as if I am right, when they fix a few things it will be much smoother I believe and won't hurt as much Rotfl. But I have found at least 3-4 bugs and one at the very least has to do with the terrains.

Since I have the full engine I will be posting next day or 2 to there Support Dept on a bunch of this stuff so I will share as soon as I am sure I do not have my head up my U know where so me not look to much like a fool lolol.

Yes I think you may be onto some stuff, but I think also there should be a way to bake the extra textures on or use shaders to get the rest of the textures on after you get the base textures in, but I have not had enough time to read up on all that yet, and some of this stuff is C and lite-C programming now to do and not scripting, so in our case that is very good as my Programmers loves that, but most of everyone else that is used to scripting is having not so a good a time of it. So please forgive if I am not posting much, I am reading and trying to figure this out as well and I hope to post some progress by the end of the weekend. I hope /wry smiles......


Good FYI's though. Have you tried re-placing the Texture map back on it after you have resized it yet? or better yet, resize the terrain first and then add the texture to it? I was just wondering as I am finding there are Bugs in the texture editor or seems to be on a bunch of different levels, and thinking that may be in part what is the problem? Just curious if you tried that by chance yet?

DT

[Atlantis]

As far as sizing goes, I have brought it into MED, resized it and then put the RGB texture and skin1 (which is supposed to be a lightmap, but with a rpg and day/night you can't bake in your lightmaps). This only made the textures blur - yes, even with the RGB map which I found to be rather surprising.

And then sometimes you have collision issues if you scale up too much. I don't know why I'm having such trouble getting the scale. You do not have issues with blurring at large levels (usually I scale 64 or 128) or collision problems?

I wonder if I should try bringing the heightmap into MED and export it to bring into Max and scale it from there as I made a cbabe scale then bring it back into MED. That's another thing to try.

You can use the RGB method with a mdl file like you do a hmp.

I can't believe all the hassles with just getting a decent terrain in. It would be nice to be able to move on to other aspects of the game.

As far as bugs go, I do not know how fast they are at fixing them.

Another issue is how to do paths and roads with the above system. I thought of making them like the old railroad track pieces (that kids put together for toy trains) and assemble those as well. Same for dirt foot paths. If you model those right, they can work right in.

I want to make a system that is efficient and fast for the rpg/mmo type game as those are rather large type games and you want to be able to build big worlds.

[DeathTwister]

Hay guy,

Humm, if your going to take it to Max, just make a huge map in L3DT? Humm anyway I agree and I just bought the full license so I am going to use some of that 1 year support and ask them about all this as I agree we need to know if we are dealing with bugs or just lame programming. It says and promotes large huge terrains so I just need to find where the right links are to look at the tuts. Oh yes I as well have been using the misty mood as a look at to figure stuff out.

Try IceX, as I have for making roads and such, trouble is, it has only 3 textures and you cannot import in terrains, just make them from scratch, so not as happy as I would like. But it can make cool roads and sidewalks, so I think I'll use it for small closed levels where terrain is not so important and use Terragen 2 deep version build 5 for making Sky boxes as I can have forests on the mountains and should blend better then TG v 09. The other trouble with IceX is no support, derr, and it is pre A7 so it was all done in scripting so some conversions I am betting, so I am sure my programmer won't like me after a while of using it, LOLOL Oh well.

I will try and post on the rest here by the end of the weekend or when support gets back to me. But I think at the very least, these are bugs and need to post part of the trouble we are having but with no docs it is hard top tell for sure ROTFL.

cheers /maylock

[Atlantis]

Well I tested method 2 using mdl7 meshes for the terrain. If you are going up hill then you tend to walk through the hill then somewhere collision takes over and you "bounce" up to the top. Coming down a hill it works just fine, you go from one terrain block to the next. If only I could resolve these collision issues when going up hill.

I have 8 different textures going on this terrain world so the script works fine. I did 4 different pieces - two ocean and two beach each with their own set of textures.

I'm going to see if I can check into this collision thing and see if I can find what is missing or where I'm going wrong.

I'll give you a demo when I get this thing polished a bit more. Still has some work to go, but it's getting there.

~~~~
Days later.

I was using a walk script from the forums to test the demo and the collision wasn't right on it as I used another walk script and the collision is fine. I'll have to tweak the scripts from the forums as I haven't found any I really like that the community can use.

[DeathTwister]

Hay bro,

Wow great news I think over all. Sorry I have not been on, but got sick again with my bad liver and also I had my computer dump on me. Now have 2 brand new ones so I should keep going this time.

OK I had to take a side trip away from the terrain issues as I needed to get a demo level for our money man, and this last weekend we got a level running in A7 build 10 Woo hoo and that was not easy as the A7 script has a huge bug in it, and unless you change the name from start to the name you want to call the level in editor, you will not see any buildings or anything when compiled and took us a while to figure out since there is NO GOOD docs on A7 yet as you know. Also 98% of all the resources with 3dgs is useless if it is A6 or older we have found. Haha welcome to the bleeding edge aye? But we have done in 3 1/2 months what we could not get together in TGA or TGEA in 3 years, so go figure /smiles.......


Now that I have a level I have glass to place, and Canvasses to add to the level, a bit of Atmo work, add Plants, flowers, grass, trees, and find some warnings that we have, which we think are bugs on there part, but checking to make sure. All in all this engine rocks, but like most no docs to learn from other then us forum posters lol.

Since we have the Pro full 3DGS I will post to the powers that be as I have a year of free support, so I plan to make there life hell until I have it together with terrains. But can't start back on it for a week or so, unless I get real lucky.

Would you post what you have done so far and give some screens shots? also how have you gotten around the texture limits, and make the terrain texture look good close up and not stretched?

One big bug I think 3DGS has as it does not see the HGS/GIS data very well at all as it does not come in at the right size like it would in most Apps, so we need to let them know they got to fix that. Having said that I am pretty sure we can find workarounds for this. At least the new build has .png and .jpg support now /smiles......the ping part is the best I think.

So if all goes well I will be hanging here for a while in the weeks to come as Aaron has updated much and I need to re-study all the new goodies that have been added.

I will post some stuff soon as well. I have screens, but none ATM with terrain. Again sorry for dropping the ball, but Life sucks sometimes.

Maylock aka DT

[demi]

I got a licence to 3DGamestudio back at A5. I was disapointed with the way terrains were implemented. Not much else to say about the engine except that if you want the source code you are going to fork out a large chunk of dough.

[DeathTwister]

Hahaha yep we have the Full Pro version with 3 man licence so we good.

Which turned out real good as only Pro can mess with the bounding boxes like we needed to do a few days back, so we were very happy bout that.

Next week all week, get Terrains together for 3DGSA7.5.

Hay Aaron when we having that contest again about video game engines again? End of the year? or is that tabled for now?

DT