Hi all,

after a long time i come back to 3dgs, got the upgrade to A7 COM. My goal is still to develop a fun flightsim game, like Ace Combat on the X360....something not too realistic but fun to play.
I am still looking for the engine i am going to use, and it turns out in most cases the limiting factor is the terrain the various engines offer. I need a huge terrain (maybe 1000km * 1000km), but still with good detail, and it should run fast. To me it looks like only Torque with their Atlas terrain engine delivers this, but then it's lacking in other departments and i don't want to dive into C++.
So here are my questions, hoping that anyone experienced with 3dgs can answer:
- Is this huge terrain possible? What is the best way to do it? Is there a tutorial that creates a landscape this big?Also, how would you "edit" this terrain? Imagine you have this 1000km * 1000km terain, how you would go to place the forests, cities, rivers, streets and so on? I mean, doing it in WED seems like a neverending task...
- Sky: Has someone already implemented volumetric 3d clouds into A7? How can it be done?
- Then, i want have a 3d cockpit. Would you do the planes HUD and screens in the cockpit with render to texture? Or are there other ways to do it; like a radar on a screen which is updated?

Ok, that's it...hope i get some good answers.

Thansk already in advance

freeflyklown

I think the only real way you could do "massive" terrain is to procedurally load individual parts of the terrain, depending on how far away the player is from them.

As for the clouds, it pretty much comes down to the artwork. What you could do is paint these small, cleverly designed parts of a cloud in a painting program, ent_create them via code, and then have them always face the player. I dunno if this is the best way, but I know that's one way to do it (I think Microsoft Flight Simulator uses this technique).

RTT Cockpit gauges: I think A7.08 is supposedly going to have fully working render-to-texture panels. Then you could just treat the gauges and digits just like normal panels, only they're rendered to the cockpit bitmap, and not directly to the screen.

For terrain: In GPU Gems 2 (the book) there is a chapter talking about a technique called Geometry Clipmaps - I think it is where you perform a texture lookup in the vertex shader and displace the vertices in realtime, but I am not too sure on this one. In the chapter is states that a demo of this technique had a 20 billion sample grid of the US in realtime. I am not sure of the benefits of displacing vertices on the GPU over modelling the terrain, except for maybe "seamless" transitions and less actual modelling.

Clouds: MrCode is right, the artwork will make a good looking cloud. Just as an idea, you could always have close-up clouds as volumetric/particle based clouds and as they get further and further away change to camera-facing billboards, that way you get the appearance of each cloud is volumetric and you can "fly through" them.

Cockpit: Like MrCode said, there is a beta version where you can render panels, etc into bitmaps.

Hope this helps a little,
Adoado

Guys,

thanks for the answers. Looks like there is no fast out of the box solution for the terrain. Good to hear about the render to texture in the upcoming release, sounds exactely what i need ;-).

freeflyklown

I think unlimited terrains need you to create a series of terrains over a grid like 3 x 3 or something, giving nine all told in this example, that will tile seamlessly with each other, then you would need to write a script to lock the Player in the centre of the map whilst everything else moved around Player when Player makes movement calls, ent_creating the terrains as needed and removing them as needed as well as the assetts they may contain.
This way you can have a few textures to add variety to the endlessly rolling terrain you have created.

Another way is to use Georges example from Aum series (forgoten which sorry) then when you need to, shift back to the center to continue.