L3DT Users' Community

Hi everybody,

My friend and I are making a RPG style game. We want a continuous huge map. As i understood, there is no engine that can support very huge terrains.

So here are few questions:

What is the best approach in making a huge terrain and successful importing it in TGEA?

As i know, TGEA can't merge nicely multiple terrain files, does it mean that making one big, continuous terrain in TGEA is impossible? Any Ideas, Clues, Hints?

I don't really understand how the sizes in km are mapped with game dimensions...
If making a parallel with lets say Lineage2 or WOW , what is their approximate map sizes in km?

How large is large? For instance, if I recall Armed Assault basic map represents 400km . I don't know anything about TGEA but I do know some are using it for large areas in a flight sim. I should guess much of it comes down to your scale.

With the Atlas plugin, you can create huge maps for TGEA.

The size is limited by disk space and how many CPU cycles you want do devote to map generation.

Hi Gleb,

jack.dingler wrote:The size is limited by disk space and how many CPU cycles you want do devote to map generation.

To the best of my knowledge, TGEA Atlas is currently limited to around 4096x4096 heightmap pixels in a single Atlas instance, principally due to the limitations of the chunked LOD geometry generator. Have you been able to generate larger Atlas maps Jack? If so, how?

Gleb.G wrote:As i know, TGEA can't merge nicely multiple terrain files, does it mean that making one big, continuous terrain in TGEA is impossible?

As far as I know, yes. You could, in theory, use several Atlas instances as 'tiles' to create a larger terrain. However, this approach wouldn't create continuous terrain because there would be visible seams at tile edges where the geometry wouldn't match up. Some people have hidden these seams by making island maps, where the edges of each tile are always underwater, and thus the seams are invisible...unless you're making a submarine game.

I might also mention that TGEA includes a terrain engine called 'MegaTerrain', in addition to Atlas. As I understand it - which is not very well - MegaTerrain can cope with very much larger terrain maps because it does not pre-calculate geometry LODs. However, I understand that it's performance is not as good as Atlas.

Another option may be to use Ogre3D's PLSM (paging landscape scene manager), which apparently is also rather good at rendering large terrain.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

Thanks for your answers...