Atlas export crashes

[holtt]

I realize this is more a Garage Games/Atlas problem and not an L3DT problem, I'm trying to use the Atlas exporter and having crashes on exports. This is using real world DEM height maps not generated terrain. The only thing I find I can do to stop the export crashes is to reduce the total vertitical extent of the heightmap. A total range of 250 meters runs without crash, as does 500. But at 1000 meters the application has a hard crash on doing an Atlas export with all default parameters. Because the real world extent of my data is approximately 1000 meters, it's rather important I actually use this extent.

Any advice at all? This is hugely frustrating since I have always found creating Atlas files a pain with frequent crashes for some time. I had high hopes that the new exporter would be a lot more stable than trying to directly export via TSEA command line.

The DEM file used is at http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lemma/gnnviz/dem.png if anyone's game to try it. The image is 1000x1000 pixels and I have L3DT change it to 1024x1024. It represents a 30x30 kilometer area with a total height range from 475 meters at the lowest elevation up to 1873 meters at the highest.

[holtt]

As a followup what's HUGELY frustrating is the amount of time I spend trying to tweak parameters to see if I can make it not crash. Each different "tweak" involves loading my project, changing some parameter, recording what I did, running atlas export, having it crash, then repeating. Very slow, very frustrating.

[Aaron]

Hi Tim,

I'm sorry to say that at the moment, the only way I can make the atlas exporter work for your map is to dump a lot of detail. One method is to re-size the heightfield to 128x128 and then back up to 1024x1024 (I was staggered that 512x512 or 256x256 didn't work!). The other method is to use the 'Operations->Heightfield->Filter (diffusion)' option. For this, I had to set the slope threshold to 0 and the max iterations to 50. This last option doesn't look as good as the first, but either way, the loss of detail is pretty severe.

Regarding the hard crash of the exporter; I had tried to prevent this by catching exceptions thrown by plugin functions. However, the exception caused by the Atlas export function is not caught by this method, which probably indicates that it's either crashing in a worker thread it creates, or it's overwriting program memory and causing another part of L3DT to crash. Either way, there is no easy trick by which I can catch and gracefully recover from this crash. I'll have another look into it, but I think we'll have to wait for Ben to pick this one up.

On that note, I'd like to forward your heightmap onto GarageGames for further testing. Would this be OK?

Best regards,
Aaron.

[holtt]

Hey Aaron - thanks for the reply and please feel free to forward the file on.

[holtt]

I'm guessing this is just rooted in the same errors that have plagued me with Atlas for about a year. To me the ability to do large terrain is THE selling point for TGEA.

[holtt]

Anything at all from the folks at GG?

As much as I like L3DT I think right now I'm not going to buy because of this error - which I do realize is something Garage Games needs to fix and not you aaron. L3DT is a wonderful tool (minus the Atlas part).

I am astonished that the Garage Games Atlas terrain is as buggy and unstable as it is, given that large terrain is I think one of the big selling points of TSE/TGEA over other platforms and that Atlas has been under development for close on 2 years now.

If there's another engine worthy of having a plugin I think it would be Multiverse (http://www.multiverse.net)

[Aaron]

Hi Tim,

The latest information I've received is that the TGEA developers are presently fixing bugs in the core engine, and will revisit the plugin after that. No ETA was given.

Best regards,
Aaron.

PS: I believe Multiverse can already import maps from L3DT (including mosaics!) Here is the relevant tutorial.

[MDynna]

Hi Tim.

I loaded up your height map, generated a texture in L3DT then exported it to Atlas. All successfully, and within about 5 minutes. This was done with the latest Release Candidate of L3DT Pro (2.5b) and the "direct export" L3DT_atlas plugin. I'd like to know more about how you were trying to import it into Atlas format.

[holtt]

Hi Tim.

I loaded up your height map, generated a texture in L3DT then exported it to Atlas. All successfully, and within about 5 minutes. This was done with the latest Release Candidate of L3DT Pro (2.5b) and the "direct export" L3DT_atlas plugin. I'd like to know more about how you were trying to import it into Atlas format.

This was running the direct exporter in l3dt - and since it was back in May, an older version.

It's sort of a moot point because I've abandoned Torque as the engine for this project in favor of Delta3d. Free, all the source code, better terrain, etc. It's missing a few things but it also let me get my terrain up and online in a day - compared to months dealing with Delta3d.

One thing I need to be able to do in the project is process data without any massaging of parameters and so forth. I need to just hand my program 20 1 degree terrain tiles and say "put these in the world" and have it go "OK!" It's fine to hand-process 1 or 2 but not 20, or 200. I work extensively with things like DTED format height maps and GeoTIFF decorators, which contain all the data one theoretically needs to do an import so anything that can just directly deal with it (like Delta3d) is OK by me.