Terrain Texturing Question....

I am faced with a problem using terrains in the engine, I have tried several approaches with no success yet. A noticed a few games such as C&C Generals, LOTR Batle For Middle Earth, & Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. All these games have terrain and using the editor you are able to place many textures on one terrain they are all tiled nicley and so on. I was wondering how they did this, is it possible with Game Studio? I came to the shader forum cause it is about the closest I have seen with the alpha blending and all but still it is no where near the amount of textures that these other games allow for the terrains.

Any suggestions from anyone to where I could tile around 10 different textures on a terrain using blending or is this a limitation from within game studio?

There are numerous shaders/fixed-function effects around the forum(shaders) and on the wiki pertaining to multitexturing terrain.

10 textures is a bit excessive, and you would have a terrible framerate. You will probably notice 3,4 or maybe 5 textures in most cases.

You can do up to 8 textures on a terrain. D3D will not allow you to use more per material.(however, these can be large, and theoretically you could break each texture into a bunch of smaller ones and tile them seperately. You might need a DLL for this however..) But to tile 8 color textures you would need to modify the terrain multitexture shader from the WIKI. The key is to use each texture's alpha channel to blend it, instead of wasting a texture for the blender texture.

you could search/google for "texture atlas"

Here is an example of what I was talking about this example has 13 different textures all tiled and blended on a terrain...there has to be a way to do this...maybe some tricks or something. I was even thinking they are using more than 1 terrain layer but that would eat away the FPS.

World Builder Image

This is from the editor for C&C Generals

you could do this with texture atlas. thats what they call the technique matt described above.

btw: the shot contains nothing special. its not using that much textures(on the terrain) its something like a 3D Painter. the realtime texture gets created from what you painted there and on you go like you ever did.

I downloaded Texture Atlas tools from Nvidia...I think for now I will use the multitexuring shader from wiki and if we get a publisher I will look more into all this and getting more textures on the terrain. The game I think really only needs 5 textures on the terrain but I want to keep it compatible with many systems, and also looking good, using 1 big texture takes away quality. Thanks for your help everyone.

I am just getting back into gamestudio, yes, i let it set on the shelf for a while.

I am currently running the extra edition of 3dgs, which does not support shaders. would i be able to do a terrain in this fashion, or would I need commercial to support shaders?

Also, been trying to log into wiki, but i havent a clue as of to what username/password they are wanting. Will not take my forum username/password or my password i received in my key file.

thanks, Clay out...

Info for accessing wiki:

http://www.conitecserver.com/wiki/index.php

I did a thing like this simple using the bitmap instructions...i made some 10x10 pixels tiles (grass, rock, sand ecc..), and a function copies them on the blank terrain texture, one for square (i have a 200x200 terrain with a 2000x2000 skin).
Then it's all antialiased by GSjanfx plugin.
This would require very much time normally, but place the painter function in a function with a while() loop called by another while() loop, and this requires only 20 seconds, because of thousands of functions called at the same time.

function paint_tile(type)
{
while()
{
....
}
}

function ...
{
while()
{
paint_tile(tile_type);
wait(1);
}
}