aaron wrote:I'm sorry I was ambiguous there; I was referring to the terrain rendering engine in your game (as opposed to the terrain generator). How is the 3d-rendering done?
The terrain rendering is from the Kaneva Game Studio engine. The terrain is converted to a mesh and rendered as a model. LOD is processed at run time. Makes really nice looking terrain but unlike chunkLOD all the mesh must be hand designed.
I outlined the process to do that here :
http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14
I tested the conversion for Torque Shader Engine and could not get very good results because Torque uses chunkLOD. The output was smaller than I wanted it and scaling streched the texture to much. I am going after realistic looking game so I was disapointed with Torque in that respect.
I made some errors on the mesh and texturing. The scene is a 512 square that was imported from the 32768 terrain and textured at x4. It is just the ocean bottom and the whole process took less than and hour. I will soon have a better looking scenes BTW. That one was just a test to determin how to proceed.
Due to the massiveness of the map I need to reduce its size. I am also considering regenerating the map since it also has flaws. Either that or I need to get a method down to batch out the files because 4096 files is going to take me YEARS!
Demi