Small test of my terrains with a simple vehicle & suspension rig

[Prime_8]

ooh
http://www.binaryzoo.com/forum/index.php?topic=1437.msg26936#msg26936

see how i baked the light map to ,  now my terrain is one tile . lol but tht is not hard as i still made the uv of each vert as i went .

[T_M_C]

Thats a really clever idea Prime.   

Unfortunately, my terrain is so large, it's takes 30 minutes walking from one end to the other, that a lightmap covering it entirely would be really low res.  Even at a high pixel resolution.

I might however be able to split the lightmap up into seperate images and apply them when necessary in realtime.

Not sure, have to think about it.

But a lightmap does sound like the best approach.

TMC

[fog]

Never having looked into this myself, couldn't you make a localised dynamic light map?  Say every time you've moved a certain distance, clear the local lightmap image and recreate a new one centred on your current location?

[Prime_8]

^^ yep that's what a shader woudl do ..
no reason you cant do it dynamiclay in render textures.

[T_M_C]

Yep.

I'm looking more deeply in terrain generation now.

Although the system i'm using works really well, it is quite old school.

A dynamically created mesh texture map and lightmap look like a neat way of doing things but it isn't practical with Blitz3d.

Texture splatting also looks like a neat way of generating the texture.

Would also mean reverting back to my one mesh terrain, wheras at the moment my terrain consists of lots of seperate quads.  Where each quad has uv coords 0-1.

Which makes applying a lightmap really tricky.

A single mesh terrain would have uv's 0-1 across the entire terrain.

Thus making it easy to apply a texture and lightmap.

If you have any more links to realtime terrain generation Prime, i'd be greatful.

Just doing a lot of research at the moment.

TMC

[Prime_8]

why not make a 2nd UV set wher UV is 0 to 1

where each tile is   tileindexU ( 1/numtiles),tileindexV(1/numtiles)
well that is psudeo code.

I stored some links in Ember forums. 

the think i hit is a BW issue  that is computational bandwidth . LOL

[T_M_C]

Ahh ok,i'll check out the Ember forums. 

Thanks.

I've actually been thinking about moving across to a different development system.

Possibly OGL where i can get access to shaders and do realtime texture splatting.

Not sure yet, still doing some research.

TMC

[fog]

I've actually been thinking about moving across to a different development system.

Possibly OGL where i can get access to shaders and do realtime texture splatting.

Not sure yet, still doing some research.

Well there's certainly plenty of choice these days.  Almost too much. 

Isn't there a module for Blitz that lets you use shaders then?  It seems to be a really well supported language when it comes to expansions.

[Prime_8]

i need to sort the cam math to grab the textures to make a sky box from my active scene .

mainly it's the cam view angle .  i think it needs to be 90. LOL and sime other stuff.

[T_M_C]

Well there's certainly plenty of choice these days.  Almost too much. 

Isn't there a module for Blitz that lets you use shaders then?  It seems to be a really well supported language when it comes to expansions.

Yeh, over the past week, i've been learning OpenGL with Blitzmax.

It supports OGL V1.1 natively but can be upgraded to the later versions which support shaders.

I'm finding it very easy at the moment.

I've ported across my Quaternion camera and object routines and bypass the OGL Euler stuff and it seems to work really well.

At the moment i've got 3000 texture mapped cubes all rotating independently, with a sky box that i can fly around at 60 fps.

Unfortuantely though, as always, theres virtually no information on using OGL with blitzmax, so it's a case of trawling the net for information now.

I think it's more a case of learning the OGL command set and how that works, more than what Blitzmax does.

But so far it's been a hell of a lot easier than setting up C++ and OGL.

Really enjoying myself at the moment.  Looking forward to getting my hands dirty with shaders.

i need to sort the cam math to grab the textures to make a sky box from my active scene .

mainly it's the cam view angle .  i think it needs to be 90. LOL and sime other stuff.

Cool, i used to do that with Terragen.

Pointing the camera at 90 degree angles wasn't a problem, but getting the view angle correct, was a bit tricky if i remember.

TMC

[fog]

Nice.  OpenGL of some kind makes a lot of sense multi-platform wise.  Unless you're talking about very top end PC stuff then does DirectX have any advantages these days?

Anyway you'll have fun with shaderzzz.  I had far too much fun making crazy patterns