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Shadow Lore

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Shadow Lore

Postby dEaThMaStEr » Fri Dec 09, 2005 8:15 pm

I'm currently working on my first commercial game work titled Shadow Lore. I've purchased the Torque Shader engine for this project and I hope to set some very interesting ground for it.There is no set time for this at all, I'm just kinda goin at my own pace making things I want at whatever speed I can do them.

The game itself will be a mix of FPS and RPG, into something I call the RPFPS, the Role Playing First Person Shooter. You'll have the basic elements of an RPG, i.e. inventory, player stats, attributes, quests, NPC towns, player classes, etc. But you'll play from a first person perspective, shooting up enemies with medieval weapons, magic, or modern and sci-fi guns!
Part of the storyline deals with the fact that the world itself is a mix of middle-ages technology with magical powers and highly advanced weapons. The world was created like this because when it was created, a terrible god bent on destroying life was created with them. The Creator of it all wished to see a new species do battle and struggle for their existence and the mix was all part of adding to the plot for him.
The humans battled the evil god and won. However a god can not be destroyed and the humans were only able to trap it in a special stone. Now about 15,000 years later somehow the dark god has been released from its prison and you play as 1 of 7 different people to choose from to try to fight back, each with their own set of skills and abilites and all under certain categories of motives.

L3DT comes into play because the heightmaps and textures are very easily places into the Torque Shader engine, making for some excellant and very quick terrain generation. Also a current plan of mine is that once I rebuild my computer, I will craft the entire planet of my game to scale, being roughly the same size as the moon. To do this I will be using L3DT terrains tiled everywhere to make a terrain that would take you a few months to cross without any obstacles at all, and of cource there will be.

Production is still in VERY early stages, however the terrain can be crafted and placed within minutes at any given moment. I'll try posting a few terrains soon so you can see what they look like ingame.
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Postby demi » Fri Dec 09, 2005 10:58 pm

Nice project.


TSE is a nice engine but I decided to go for a free one. The draw back is I have to model the landscape as a model. While it sounds difficult it is easy.

Good luck to you.

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Postby Sage » Wed Dec 14, 2005 7:25 am

Hello fellow Garagegamer!

Your project sounds huge! Best wishes on all your work.
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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:07 pm

As said, here are a couple screens of my work so far. I'll post more later when I have a chance. This is a large mountain range I setup really quick. The second shot shows the small dot that is the player, for size reference.
Image

Image

Edited to fix 2nd image URL - Aaron
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Re: Shadow Lore

Postby Aaron » Thu Dec 15, 2005 10:18 am

Hello dEaThMaStEr,

Welcome to the users' community. It certainly sounds like you've planned out an interesting and ambitious project, and I wish you the best of luck with it. The screenshots look like a great start. Well done!

Were you using a mosaic heightmap, or just a mosaic texture? Also, if you don't mind me asking, what frame-rate were you getting out of TSE, and what sized map were you using? I ask this because I'm thinkering about buying a TSE license next year (possibly to make L3DTVi3), and I'd like to get a bit of an idea as to whether the atlas terrain renderer is as cool as I've heard.

For anyone interested, the reason I'm moving away from GLScene is not due to any technical failing or lack of support (both are great), but rather because I suck royally at Delphi and I'd like to get something in C++.

dEaThMaStEr wrote:There is no set time for this at all, I'm just kinda goin at my own pace making things I want at whatever speed I can do them.


I guess that's the best way to do things, and maybe the only way to learn.

dEaThMaStEr wrote:Also a current plan of mine is that once I rebuild my computer, I will craft the entire planet of my game to scale, being roughly the same size as the moon. To do this I will be using L3DT terrains tiled everywhere to make a terrain that would take you a few months to cross without any obstacles at all, and of cource there will be.


Whoa, the million-dollar question: Do you actually want to make a globe, or just a really, really big heightmap? This is something that has popped-up quite a bit recently, and the more I think about it the more I realise that it's a very thorny problem to make a globe. Suffice to say, L3DT only makes planar heightmaps, a globe requires some sort of spherical heightmap, and it's topologically impossible to map from a plane to a sphere (and vice versa) without nasty tears or severe distortion. There may be some very clever projection methods that could allow you to un-wrap a sphere onto a plane with minimal distortion (eg da Vinci's octants, Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion), but the code to manage the tears and wacky pixel-indexing would have to be appallingly complex. It's not something I'm plannning to add to L3DT any time soon.

In short, globes are nasty.

Anyway, welcome again and good luck with Shadow Lore.

Cheers,
Aaron.
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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Thu Dec 15, 2005 4:56 pm

Actually, in that screenshot its only a single heightmap and texture. TSE doesn't have a loading function in yet to import multiple heightmaps and texture maps and combine them into one so you either have to use a single image for both or make multiple terrains and tile those but that can be a pain in the ass.

As for frame rate, I'm not sure on the exact number, but its good, I can assure ya that. My video card at the moment isn't too robust so it has some issues, plus TSE hasn't been optimised at all yet, so things aren't as good as they will be. But I've never noticed any speed issues at any time. No matter how much terrain is in view, the game always seems to run just as fast.

For the terrain size, I just used a 4096 heightmap at a 10 scaling, so that terrain there is about 40,960 meters to scale.
And I can assure you that the TSE license is probably very very well worth it. I found it very nice and I don't think you'll have any complaints either. ;)

As for my world project, I had no intentions of making it one giant globe. This would be kinda neat, but there would be several complicated things to do with the terrain system and generation of them, physics, etc. In the end its really not worth it cause you can't notice the curve of the earth as you walk anyhow. Unless maybe your just realllly good. heh

For the creation of it, I'm just going to make many very very large terrains and tile them together. I'll have to zone it off a bit though because the load times would get way too big and the coordinate system may start to go nuts after so much. Thats it if holds up at all. I'm still not sure what effects will come from that. This entire idea may not work! But lets just hope. heh
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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Thu Dec 15, 2005 5:05 pm

Hope double posts aren't minded. These are some screenshots of the Fjord I made with the tutorial on the site.
Image
Image
Image
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Postby Aaron » Thu Dec 15, 2005 11:16 pm

:shock:

Outstanding!

dEaThMaStEr wrote:Hope double posts aren't minded.


Nah, I do it all the time. We're very laissez faire around here.

dEaThMaStEr wrote:Actually, in that screenshot its only a single heightmap and texture. TSE doesn't have a loading function in yet to import multiple heightmaps and texture maps and combine them into one so you either have to use a single image for both or make multiple terrains and tile those but that can be a pain in the ass.


I see. I had assumed you were using a tiled texture because there appears to be a tile-seam in the second image you posted (at the snow-rock interface, centre-bottom):

http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/7082/mountain10lt.jpg

That's what tile-seams look like in L3DTVi2 anyway. Any ideas what is causing this in TSE?

dEaThMaStEr wrote:As for my world project, I had no intentions of making it one giant globe.
...
For the creation of it, I'm just going to make many very very large terrains and tile them together. I'll have to zone it off a bit though because the load times would get way too big and the coordinate system may start to go nuts after so much.


Good-o. Zoning sounds like a good idea too; for big maps you'll definitely be past the limit of precision for a float. That reminds me, I really should move to using double-precision variables in a few bits of L3DT.

Hmm...would double-precision be enough for a coordinate-space, I wonder? Say your map is a couple of thousand kilometres across. With 16 sig figs of a double, at the extreme edge of your map you'd be using the first 7 or so to describe the million metres from the origin, but you'd still have 9 left to desribe the positions of things to the nearest nanometre. Whoa, that' sounds too good be true. Is my logic flawed there somewhere?

On another topic, might I be able to convince you to post some of those lovely images in the users' gallery:

http://www.bundysoft.com/coppermine/

I'm cool with images being posted from image shack or elsewhere, but it would be nice to see some of those beauties hosted here. You can upload directly to the developers showcase gallery, or you can make your own album using the 'Create / order my albums' button and upload to there.

(Hmmm...I really need to change the font-size in coppermine. That button is only about 8 pixels high.)

Cheers,
Aaron.
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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Fri Dec 16, 2005 3:47 am

The seam is caused by a current flaw in Atlas. Atlas divides the terrain up into small tiles for increased performance. When you work with a proportionatly low resolution texture like I'm doing in there (i think its around 5 meters to the pixel) you get those nasty seams on the edges of the tiles. Notice the Fjord is perfectly clean cause its much higher in proportion.

For the double, as far as I can think that sounds right. But then, I'm quite tired at the moment ;) Doubles would pretty much solve a lot of worry for me but unfortunatly shaders cant read them, least i've been told that, and so a coordinate system based on it like that is in the trash. :(

And ya, I'd be glad to upload my pictures to there. I've made god knows how many of these terrains now, well over a dozen I'm sure. I'll prolly get to it tomarrow as I am rather tired now and need sleep.
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Postby Aaron » Fri Dec 16, 2005 6:37 am

dEaThMaStEr wrote:The seam is caused by a current flaw in Atlas. Atlas divides the terrain up into small tiles for increased performance.


It's a sensible plan on GG's part, but as I mentioned in the below thread, they probably need to re-pack the tiles to include a row and column worth of pixels from neighbouring tiles. That's how L3DTVi2 avoids seams in the tiled heightfields, though it isn't currently done for tiled water or textures.

http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=32

dEaThMaStEr wrote:Doubles would pretty much solve a lot of worry for me but unfortunatly shaders cant read them, least i've been told that, and so a coordinate system based on it like that is in the trash. :(


Yeah, that is unfortunate, but surely this state of affairs won't last too much longer. ATI and nVidia have to find something new to pack in their fancy cards, or else people won't upgrade.

Cheers,
Aaron.
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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Thu Jan 12, 2006 2:38 am

Here is a picture of my best work to date. I am starting to get very good at this scene creation stuff I think. ;)

Mountains are hand-crafted btw

Image
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Postby Aaron » Thu Jan 12, 2006 3:58 am

Eww, I just drooled all over my keyboard.

Top work dEaThMaStEr, it's looking fantastic!
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Postby Hinklemister » Thu Jan 12, 2006 9:08 pm

Wow, that's beautiful! I especially like the water. I wish to rival that someday. Someday...
Great Job!

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Postby Aaron » Fri Jan 13, 2006 6:02 am

Hi dEaThMaStEr,

Rather than uploading to imageshack, could I convince you to upload the images in the users' gallery? It'd be nice to see some more content there, particularly so for beautiful images like this.

Cheers,
Aaron.
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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Fri Jan 13, 2006 11:06 am

Sure, I'll load some work up when I get home today. ;)
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