... are people who are doing things like flight sims, naval battle games, etc using to achieve a large outdoor level.

From what I've read so far, the A5 engine is limited to a gamespace of 50,000 quants square... a quant being appx an inch... is this right?

I ask because I am considering A5 for a naval sim, and would need a lot of ocean... at least a 50 mile by 50 mile square game area.

Any input, suggestions, whatever would be appreciated as to how you would approach something like this in A5.

Thanks
--Mike

Hi mike ..

As far as i know,you did some very good stuff with
Blitz 3d.
I think with the A5 engine it will be hard to
realize this project.
So in this case - Blitz 3D should be youre choice.

Bolo Loco

Repost from "Drive 5 minutes":

The solution I would use is "Treadmill Space". Split your world up into "tiles". Load 9 tiles in a square with the player positioned in the center tile. When the player reaches the edge of a tile, remove the 3 tiles behind the player and load the 3 tiles in front of the player.

Using this method you can have unlimited space.

You need to write some kind of a C-script(WDL) loader engine, which will load or replace ocean- or island/terrain/block- enitities. This could be done based on a two dimensional variable array:

Everytime your plane reaches a certan x/y border value in the quant universe, the border can be checked if its the top, bottom, left or right levelborder, and next a new level/entitie might be loaded/created then, depending on the appr. variable value found in the neighboured 2D array position(top, bottom, left or right). So, in a way, your plane flies throught the 2D array, each array variable represents a square field of a level, and the contents of each variable can be used as an index for the level to be loaded.

However, the difficulty would be to create a balance between the clipping (-distance) value and the loading of the new entity/level to generate an acceptable, not distorted view on the landscape/ocean.

Also: You need to do a socalled "normalisation", that means, you have to replace the plane's and all other visible entities' position in the 3DGS universe regularily to prevent the plane from running out of quantum universe. This can be done by simply subtracting the appr. x or y value from teh plane and all other entities from time to time or at a certain x/y limit value.

This is a traditional 3D realtime engine technique, and I took it from AMOS 3D. AMOS was an exellent AMIGA Basic and AMOS 3D was an 3D extension for it (Voodoo ? does anyone know anything about a relationship between Voodoo 3DFX founders and AMOS 3D ?)

Anyway, I hope my ideas can help you a bit. I am thinking about writing an C-Script engine like the suggested one myself, but I'm not sure, that I can find enough spare time for that. Well, let's see.

JH

I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for, but try the free program named Terrain_Del on the top right side of this link:
http://arrowsoft.ifrance.com/arrowsoft/
I think you'll really like it.

It uses 256x256 bmp hightmaps to produce an "infinite" terrain and four 64x64 bmp textures to map seccessive altitudes. There are specifics for making and insrting these into the program for yourself.

Somewhere on the link Vlad names the one from whom he got the primary code, so you might contact either one of them for more information.

Down in the 3dgs forum section devoted to suggestions about future features to our game I requested the ability to build a world using Terrains_Del's method.

Warning: Terrain_Del is highly addictive for those such as me who are easily amused. I used to rev it up and just cruse for hours at a time. Since one rarely approachs a feature from the same angle twice it really does look like the world is immense. Hope you like wandering the oceans and at last sighting land in the distance. It's so realistic.

If you turn up any useful information, please post it here. Maybe putting this kind of thing in 3dgs can be done very easily, and that would be nice.

Bolo, Doug, Jurgen, Orgo... THANKS very much for the replies...

... it looks like I have a lil bit of coding in front of me

At least now I have some perspective from which to work from.

Thanks Again

--Mike