Love your tower concept and the shading looks impressive.
The ingame recorder is interresting as making movies is a long drawn out process.

I really like this project. don't stop!
I downloaded the demo as well, it's very cool. especially on the structure + texture side... it's such a complex structure, but I still can't see any seams... very cool.
What would be nice would be a demo with more adjustable parameters. i have no idea how all this works, but you do have some sort of primitve or sets of parameters that make sure the path is always correctly formed, right? if the user could adjust that, I'd really like it

Hi, its me again.
I worked a bit on some volumetric clouds for the game, they are completely dynamic. I think they already look good enough to show them, though there are still many issues, like the shading which must be better (currently its just tracing upwards, if it hits another cloud it get shaded darker). (i know there are some sorting errors, but i will not change it as this would require to much cpu power)

The clouds consists of several thousands of billboards, which is not that a big problem itself but because of the alphablending it really hurts the fillrate (i hope i can solve this with rendering the clouds to a smaller rendertarget seperatly).

Some screenshots: (note, the clouds doesnt get counted in the vertexes and polygon numbers)
taken on a PentiumD 820, Geforce6600GT


using a different texture:

more screenshots on my website.

Finally something for the scientist of you:
For simulating a cloud physical correct you have to calculate every 0.01mm thick waterdrop. Because this would be to much work i don't do that. My method is way faster than the physical approach.
In numbers:

(Don't take the numbers to serious)

greets
Chrisb

lol

im so in love with your tower concept I have to make one like it

Do you use small sprites with roll to layer your clouds?

Would small animated ones drag too much do you think?

Hi, just a small update this time, mainly a tribute to the 4gb ram upgrade.
I'm currently trying to increase the "omg, this is huge"-feeling and added a simple landscape and made the tower 5 times larger. It is as detailed as before but uses 4 lod steps.
The voxel map of the tower is 256*256*2560 big.



more screenshots
Next task is to add some sort of atmospheric scattering to the shading to get rid of the simple blue fog.

I've also added a .wmb level output (a7.7 format, works with lite-c), though lite-c seems not to be able to load levels with millions of triangles. Here some screenshots of a smaller tower in lite-c:



(lite-c is cheating on the number of tris in the depug display, the level consist of twice as much) (its also possible to export lod-meshes which are much more optimized)
You can also download the level: level_1.rar
simply open it with acknex.exe, or load it with a script.


As the geometrie gets calculated via several shaders i originally planed to take part at the shader contest. Though i think i won't get many votes with this as it is not a shader to create fancy looking surfaces or a complete easy to include shader package. For most of the user its simply useless.

omg, this is huge... :P

nice work... I'd like to see more rounded edges at the top though -> the transition from rock to grass is much too sudden in my oppinion.
Also, when will you make a game of this?

Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken Chicken chicken chicken chicken.

Chicken chicken!
Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken, chicken chicken chicken chicken Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken. Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken! 30 chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken 0.5-1 chicken chicken chicken chicken! Chicken chicken chicken!

Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken? Chicken chicken?

chicken? oh YEAH CHICKEN !!!!
Great Stuff!

cYa Sebastian

Totally love it!

Still I would like to see this used in a game. Procedural asteroids is something I could really use for my project atm. Or a procedural world, maybe with less detail. Or a procedural mountain with caves in it...

Of course, I have no idea about this stuff, so I don't know if any of the above is realistic.
Are you going to make a game with it? or are you just messing around for fun atm?

Great progress, the lod-steps seem to work real nice...