Posted By: ulf
alternative terrain approach - 04/06/06 09:03
hey, i would like to discuss an alternative terrain approach like seen in demonica. http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/640695/an/0/page/0#640695
templar the developer said:
i have thought a bit about it and i would like to discuss how you could implent a terrain like this.
basically i think you have to make the "several aligned models" with a modeller. you can make tiles in my opinion. at least for things like a town the tiles have to be the same size powers of 2. each tile has to fit to the next and so on. this way you can make roads on flat terrain. you would need a special size for each tile and a seemless texture so you dont see the transitions.
you would have to position each gap directly close to the next.
i dont know yet how you could achieve correct collision behaviour, i mean is it possible to work like on terrain? so let the player walk on top of a model and walk up if the model has a hill? this might sound a bit noobish but i really havent used models as ground yet! and here is where i dont get further with this solution? i thought models use a bounding box wich is squared. and if you use polygon collision you lose a lot of performance and get bugs?
there are only advantages with this approach i think. namely you can even have things like caves in your terrain. you can have shadows on the texture to save rendering power. you can use unlimited terrain textures not only 3 like with normal terrain+shader. models render faster in a6 compared to a big terrain.
the only disadvantages i could think of where the improved work for the terrain tiles. and maybe the higher texture consumption.
well please contribute to this idea, how could you improve it and so on?
thanks in advance!
templar the developer said:
Quote:
- the terrain consists of several aligned uv mapped models
- what you see on the ground is really in the texture - no shaders, no dynamic shadows (except for the characters), no rendering to texture
i have thought a bit about it and i would like to discuss how you could implent a terrain like this.
basically i think you have to make the "several aligned models" with a modeller. you can make tiles in my opinion. at least for things like a town the tiles have to be the same size powers of 2. each tile has to fit to the next and so on. this way you can make roads on flat terrain. you would need a special size for each tile and a seemless texture so you dont see the transitions.
you would have to position each gap directly close to the next.
i dont know yet how you could achieve correct collision behaviour, i mean is it possible to work like on terrain? so let the player walk on top of a model and walk up if the model has a hill? this might sound a bit noobish but i really havent used models as ground yet! and here is where i dont get further with this solution? i thought models use a bounding box wich is squared. and if you use polygon collision you lose a lot of performance and get bugs?
there are only advantages with this approach i think. namely you can even have things like caves in your terrain. you can have shadows on the texture to save rendering power. you can use unlimited terrain textures not only 3 like with normal terrain+shader. models render faster in a6 compared to a big terrain.
the only disadvantages i could think of where the improved work for the terrain tiles. and maybe the higher texture consumption.
well please contribute to this idea, how could you improve it and so on?
thanks in advance!