Hello
I've been working on a little plugin for Earth Sculptor. The plugin is designed to chop up the E.S. mesh into sectors. This combined with the LOD setting on export produces fairly good results (What you get are more polys where you need them and less in flat areas)... You can also then do all sorts of things like make caves, add stuff in wed and weld them to the terrain, etc... etc... etc... I haven't explored all the possibilities this gives (nor the drawbacks) but it seems as though there could be a little more freedom using sectors than HMPs.
The pluses I have found so far:
Automatic management of sectors by 3dgs engine
Can be manipulated in an external 3d package like Max.
No LOD popping (Trees dont appear to float in the air with lower LOD)
Further oportunity to cull sectors by implementing basic occluder culling.
Can have caves (By editing the sector mesh)
Cons:
No LOD, WYSIWYG
More models to manage
Can't touch the outside edge vertices
Completely untested strategy
So why this post?
Three reasons. The first is if this is something that others will use then it allows me to give back to the community. Secondly, I could do with some help on various aspects, from simple info to adding features to testing or ? Last but not least, the team I work with are always looking for talented people and this seems like a decent way of getting to know other ambitious game people without any formal shit getting in the way.
Current features:
The plugin exports all the sectors (models) and (optionally) creates a wmp file that will open in WED and load all the entities. I am having some issues with skins which I'm working on right now but the basic export is almost done.
Planned features:
Add actions for shader integration. (asap)
Absolutely seamless export to 3dgs (asap)
Automatic occluder creation (way off, can be done by hand initially)
Automatic water creation (a little ways off as can be done by hand fairly quickly)
Current bugs:
Problem saving skin info (external skins)
Issue with 16x16 sectors, wmp and models seem fine but WED only loads 225 of them (instead of 256)... (Really wondering about that one.)
Let me know if there is any interest on any of the three points I wrote earlier. Also, If you're a C++/C programmer and feel like you could contribute then please also let me know and we can discuss a way of working together.
Later
Lim3y
