Hello. I've noticed that it seems I can only map a terrain using one texture that stretchs over the vast enormity of it and when playing the game, at close distance that looks pretty darn ugly and blurry. I've heard about mipmapping, detail mapping, detail "textures", however I can't seem to find much in the manual about it and the posts I've searched don't seem detailed enough(no pun intended). I'm trying to create a terrain that doesn't look so blurry at close range and I really am at a loss how to do so; I'm working with a graphics card that doesn't have shaders, so I'd prefer a non-shader method(detail mapping, bump mapping, etc.-mapping are not shaders according to JCL), however I should be getting one that does soon so don't be afraid to post shader-code if it'd be helpful. Could someone provide some instructions? Step-by-step perhaps?

So far my attempts at mipmapping have been ... add second skin, import the same skin image as the first skin, click the "convert to: mipmaps" and then saving the terrain file and then incorporating it into the level: Nothing changes. Blurrrrrrr...

Try this:

- use two skins for terrain;

- 1st skin 1024x1024 not mipmapped;

- 2nd skin 512x512 mipmapped (detail texture);

- in main() use detail_size = 9; (play with this value);

- detail_size engine variable steel works although will be removed in future updates i think.

I've tried this out verbatim, however I wasn't really noticing a difference. One odd thing, though, was when adding the second skin and applying the 512x512 texture, it reverted the first skin to 512x512 as well(Or that's what the bottom bar of the MED skin editor window said("512x512x24"...)); So it's like the first's texture size didn't matter. But, then again, the texture's resolution didn't seem to change so perhaps it didn't actually change.

Anyhow, I created a very visible 512x512 WILDLY colored map(Think many different buckets of brightly colored Circus-like paint being dumped on a canvas.) for testing and applied that as the detail-map; I then tweaked the detail_size in the "main" feature(I'm using the template 5 script) between 1 and 512 at 1, 5, 10, 100, 256, 512, to see if there was any noticeable difference and I noticed not; However, I did notice that in the blackened parts of the first texture, it seemed as if the second texture was attempting to peak through(The blackened spots were outlined with red, blue, green: Bright colors)... So I'm guessing the black parts are interpreted as transparencies and some parts of the second, underlying, skin were showing through. Is this what mipmapping is about? I'm getting the feeling not, but I've never noticed "mipmapping" or "detail-mapping" in games. I've just noticed that in vast desert terrains in the game "Delta Force: Land Warrior"(a 2000 game), they seem to "tile" their extremely large terrains with a desert texture(I doubt they created one 20000x20000 desert picture, though they may've used some inhouse on-the-fly terrain texturer that automatically tiled it; Though, if they did, why doesn't 3dgs offer that functionality?) and thought that's what mipmapping might've been about. How is that possible with 3dgs's suite? Is there a way to tile a texture on a heightmap / terrain without having to lug around the full-honking 100MB terrain texture? I'm searching google now since this would seem to be a pretty widespread game-development problem/stepping-stone.

I think one solution may be just finding a MED-compatible image format that automatically detects tiled-patterns and compresses them accordingingly(.Tif, .Bmp, .Tga, .Pcx, etc.) to a manageable size and using the 20000x20000 picture resolution, but then a problem: Wouldn't the game-engine simply decompress that 100MB to the RAM or Video-Ram? That would seem to be kind of hoggish... >.>

The solution above works with a6.40 version. Unless you are using A5 engine, i dont know why you are using A5 templates, so i cant help you cause i never use templates.

If you have the latest version upgraded you will see that MED can do the texture tiling (tile+ tile- buttons) and you just have to make those two skins as mentioned and apply mipmaps in the detail texture and remove mipmaps from the first (MED apply mipmaps by default).

About the shaders stuff just search in the wiki page. There are a detail map fixed function effect that you can eventually use.

Hope it helps.

Hmmm... That might be the problem. I was simply using the A5 template "player_move" script temporarily for testing purposes and I didn't really think it would've affected the terrain rendering since the game window shows "A6 engine" at top. I'll change it to the A6 template to see if that changes anything.

I'm also currently upgrading to the 6.40 version to check out the tiling feature; I know it was a feature that utillilia(sp?) was panning for back in november, 2005, and he had the exact same problem as I so that might just be a godsend.

You can use a multitexture effect on the terrain to tile the textures that you applied to your terrain in Med and then use a blendmap ".tga" file to blend the two textures to add stuff like paths on the terrain. You can find the multitexture effect on the 3DGS home page->"AU Recources"->"WDL & DLLs"->"Physics terrain and multi-texture shader"

Heres what mipmapping is, it seemd you don't have a clue:

"A MIP map (sometimes spelled mipmap) is a computer graphics technique used to achieve an illusion of depth in a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional (3D) image. Used in conjunction with texture mapping, MIP mapping features multiple images of a single texture map at different resolutions to represent surface textures at varying distances from the viewer's perspective: the largest scaled image is placed in the foreground and progressively smaller ones recede toward the background area. Each scale difference is defined as a MIP map level. MIP mapping helps avoid unwanted jagged edges (called jaggies) in an image that can result from using bit map images at different resolutions."
Taken off: whatis.techtarget.com