Got a problem or need advice?
by Thing 2 » Sun May 28, 2006 7:24 pm
Hi guys,
I've been working through the tut's here and I love the program so far. I just want to be sure I'm getting my island looking as good as I possibly can =)
We're begining work on a game and we're using the torque shader engine to do it. It's my job to create the island, well it's a continent really, something like 2700 miles across. I have my heightfield and it imports perfectly thanks to Aaron
Just wondering if anyone is/has worked on anything similar and if you have any advice for a L3DT n00b. The design maps are still a bit of a mystery to me, I'm not even sure if I need mess with it being that my island is an imported heightfield? I'd also like to take advantage of bump mapping as well as make my own climates.
I'm still getting used to L3DT in general, anything I could or should do in the early stages before I start adding detail? Anything at all, I'll take any advice I can get
Thanks,
Jay
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Thing 2
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by Thing 2 » Sun May 28, 2006 7:40 pm
After I changed the verticle scale of my island I got 4 colored lines, red, blue, green and yellow. Which one is sea level? blue? I thought it was green, the green line that I see is where I'd actually like to have my sea level be but in the histogram/intgral displays the word Sea is written in blue....
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by Aaron » Mon May 29, 2006 6:06 am
Hi Jay,
Thing 2 wrote:It's my job to create the island, well it's a continent really, something like 2700 miles across.
Wow, hefty. Can I ask what map size you are using, and what type of game this is going to be? I ask because at L3DT's current limit (131,072 x 131,072 pixel heightfield), 2700 miles works out to around 35m/pixel, which is probably no-good for a FPS/RPG/RTS, but OK for a flight-sim. If you want finer resolution than this, I can probably increase the limit - but it's going to be unimaginably slow at this size, and you'll quickly run out of disk-space. Thing 2 wrote:The design maps are still a bit of a mystery to me, I'm not even sure if I need mess with it being that my island is an imported heightfield?
The design map is only needed when: - You generate the heightfield using the design/inflate algorithm (doesn't apply here).
- You want to 'paint' different climates in different places (eg 'arctic' up north, 'desert' down south, etc).
- You want to use the high-res 'per pixel land types' texture routine.
In the latter two cases, you only need to use the 'Operations->Design map->Generate from HF' option to get the design map for your imported heightfield. Warning: This option is broken in v2.4 beta2; a fix is coming next week. Thing 2 wrote:I'd also like to take advantage of bump mapping as well as make my own climates.
I wouldn't delve too deeply into this until beta3 next week. I've changed a lot of things relating to climates and bump-maps. Thing 2 wrote:After I changed the vertical scale of my island I got 4 colored lines, red, blue, green and yellow. Which one is sea level? blue? I thought it was green, the green line that I see is where I'd actually like to have my sea level be but in the histogram/intgral displays the word Sea is written in blue....
Urgh...another case of inconsistent UI design. The red contour line is sea-level, green is 100m above sea-level, blue is 100m below sea-level, and I can't quite remember what yellow is (maybe 500m increments?). The easy check is to double-left-click the mouse on the heightfield - it should show the altitude in a pop-up dialog box. While we're at it, the altitude under the mouse-cursor should also be shown in the status-bar at the bottom-right of the window.
Cheers,
Aaron.
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by Thing 2 » Mon May 29, 2006 5:58 pm
aaron wrote:Wow, hefty. Can I ask what map size you are using, and what type of game this is going to be? I ask because at L3DT's current limit (131,072 x 131,072 pixel heightfield), 2700 miles works out to around 35m/pixel, which is probably no-good for a FPS/RPG/RTS, but OK for a flight-sim. If you want finer resolution than this, I can probably increase the limit - but it's going to be unimaginably slow at this size, and you'll quickly run out of disk-space.
The heightfield I imported is 868x666px, which L3DT informed me it had to change slightly, I don't remember the number exactly but it wasn't much. Then I changed the horizontal scale to 3300 to get my continent to measure roughly 2700 meters across. Is that unreasonable? I honestly don't know, this is my first forray into making a huge island for a game =) btw it's going to be an FPS Is it even going to be possible to create an island this big? And you said I'd run out of disk space, will that carry over to the total file size of our game? Also how big (in meters) could I reasonably make an island with the current limitations? aaron wrote:The design map is only needed when: ...
- You want to 'paint' different climates in different places (eg 'arctic' up north, 'desert' down south, etc).
- You want to use the high-res 'per pixel land types' texture routine.
Thanks, I will be needing to have different climates in different areas regardless of how big our island ends up being and I would like them to be as high-res as they can reasonably be (again, need to discover the limitations) aaron wrote:Thing 2 wrote:I'd also like to take advantage of bump mapping as well as make my own climates.
I wouldn't delve too deeply into this until beta3 next week. I've changed a lot of things relating to climates and bump-maps. The red contour line is sea-level, green is 100m above sea-level, blue is 100m below sea-level, and I can't quite remember what yellow is (maybe 500m increments?). The easy check is to double-left-click the mouse on the heightfield - it should show the altitude in a pop-up dialog box. While we're at it, the altitude under the mouse-cursor should also be shown in the status-bar at the bottom-right of the window. Cheers, Aaron.
Thanks man, I appreciate the help, I'll be back with more questions I'm sure.
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by Aaron » Tue May 30, 2006 6:23 am
Hi Jay,
I'd recommend firstly that you start off with something smaller, and work your way up. Generating a massive map without being really familiar with the tools and techniques is going to be much harder.
Thing 2 wrote:Then I changed the horizontal scale to 3300 to get my continent to measure roughly 2700 meters across. Is that unreasonable? I honestly don't know, this is my first forray into making a huge island for a game =)
A horizontal scale of ~3km means the terrain will look extremely flat and boring. Operation Flashpoint, which also had 'large' islands, used something like 100m spacing (IIRC), and it looked far too flat (you could easily see the polys). Modern FPS/RPG's would be using horizontal scales of the order of about 1m to get the required mesh detail to do things like ditches, ledges on cliffs, etc. Thing 2 wrote:Is it even going to be possible to create an island this big? And you said I'd run out of disk space, will that carry over to the total file size of our game? Also how big (in meters) could I reasonably make an island with the current limitations?
It's possible, but not recommended, to make a map that big. Let's do some numbers: Firstly, lets set the maximum size of the heightfield on disk to 1Gb - since you want to leave some space on your DVD for textures and such. So, at 1Gb, assuming 2 bytes per pixel (16-bit is good for terrain), you get 512 megapixels. I'm not considering any mesh-decimation or data compression tricks here, as L3DT supports neither for heightfield data. Anyhoo, taking the square root of 512 megapixels gives you a 23,000 x 23,000 pixel heightfield. If we assume a fairly conservative spacing of 10m (L3DT's default), that gives you 230km x 230km. How long would that take to cross? Caesar's armies could do 40 miles per day (thankyou Wikipedia), so they could cross that map in about three and a half days. That doesn't sound like a long time, does it? And that's taking a gigabyte of hard-disk. If we get silly and use the current limit in L3DT (128k x 128k pixels), you get 1311 by 1311 kilometers. According to my rough estimates, that's about 20 days of forced-marching on Caesar's part, and it would be something like 32 gigabytes of disk-space. How large does it really need to be is another question. Do you honestly want to make gamers take 20 in-game days to cross your continent? I think I'd get bored in that time. Thing 2 wrote:Thanks, I will be needing to have different climates in different areas regardless of how big our island ends up being and I would like them to be as high-res as they can reasonably be (again, need to discover the limitations)
Well, the limitation is really how large a texture you can render in your game engine. If you take a look at the latest screenshots in the gallery, those were taken with a 16x high-res texture (a puny 256 x 256 pixel heightmap with a 4096 x 4096 texture). If you're looking at a 128k x 128k heightfield with a 16x texture, that's a 2 million x 2 million pixel texture. It's theoretically possible to render a texture that large with clip-mapping, but I don't think it's been demonstrated yet (anyone, please correct me if I'm wrong).
So, getting back to my opening point - I recommend you generate a more moderate-sized map (say 4096 x 4096 @10m / pixel) and play with it in your game engine to get a feel for the size and how it looks. Then, when your ready, you can ramp-up the size to the largest that is manageable. Exactly where that point lies is dependent on your game code.
Cheers,
Aaron.
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by Thing 2 » Sat Jun 03, 2006 5:29 am
Thanks again Aaron, I was wondering tho,
aaron wrote:Anyhoo, taking the square root of 512 megapixels gives you a 23,000 x 23,000 pixel heightfield. If we assume a fairly conservative spacing of 10m (L3DT's default), that gives you 230km x 230km.
Would that look ok for a modern FPS? We'd like our island to be as big as it can possibly be while still looking competitive.
Thanks man, I appreciate all this cross-quoting craziness ![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
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by Thing 2 » Sat Jun 03, 2006 5:52 am
btw, is there a name for the lines on a heighfield? Or do you just describe them as "the lines on a heightfield"?
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by Aaron » Mon Jun 05, 2006 2:12 am
Hi Jay,
Thing 2 wrote:Would that look ok for a modern FPS? We'd like our island to be as big as it can possibly be while still looking competitive.
I'd say that 10m/pixel would be the maximum pixel-spacing you could use for a FPS. I think battlefield2 uses 2m/pixel. Thing 2 wrote:btw, is there a name for the lines on a heighfield? Or do you just describe them as "the lines on a heightfield"?
I believe 'contour line' is the correct term.
Cheers,
Aaron.
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