ArtifexTerra Terrain Editor [1.2 Beta Release 10.3.14 Pg.16]

A place to show off your latest screenshots and for people to comment on them. Only start a new thread here if you have some nice images to show off!
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by jacmoe »

MCin22 wrote:(corrupted main site; where is Ogre 1.4.9 VS80 version to download!!)
You can find all releases on Sourceforge. :wink:
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by MCin22 »

@Nauk

Well, my project anyway will be only for Windows :P.

@jacmoe

Thank, I'll check this out ;).

Now I've got working VC++ and I'm changing paths in project file :). Anyway, thanks!
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by Nauk »

Good news and a short update: I have been working on the loader code all day, and managed to completely remove the ETM dependency without loosing the 9 texture splatting nor the dynamic lighting - much more simple than anticipated. So now you will be able to load a full fledged Artifex-Scene with pure vanilla Ogre-TSM only and PagedGeometry if you want grass :) . Code release coming up the next days (tm).
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by MCin22 »

Thats great news! And in 0.90 will be option for Paged Trees?
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by Nauk »

You can already use PagedGeometry for the trees you plant with Artifex, just assign them to an object group and then feed that object group to PagedGeometry when you load the scene with your app, very simple.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by MCin22 »

Well, thanks :P. I've never tried it this way :wink: .
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by tdev »

Nauk wrote:Good news and a short update: I have been working on the loader code all day, and managed to completely remove the ETM dependency without loosing the 9 texture splatting nor the dynamic lighting - much more simple than anticipated. So now you will be able to load a full fledged Artifex-Scene with pure vanilla Ogre-TSM only and PagedGeometry if you want grass :) . Code release coming up the next days (tm).
great news :)
do you plan to implement terrain paging?
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by Nauk »

Thanks :) I am thinking about it since quite a while, and wether it should be part of the editor and risk it becoming bloaty or broken, seeing most current paging solutions for ogre ended up either way or both, or it would be better to provide an external framework. Either way, I will compare and evaluate the different possibilities and at least make the concept and prepare the foundation for it before 1.0 is out.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [v0.90 RC1b - Release! - Pg.5]

Post by plfiorini »

Nauk wrote:@plfiorini: I guess the engines name is Ainur? Sounds very interesting, I am looking forward and am curious what you are cooking there. Are you making it with a game project in mind or are you more interested in the engine itself? Don't worry about it being the first steps, Artifex is more or less my first 3D project too and if you just keep making the next step and stick to it you'll get somewhere :)
ArtifexTerra is a very good editor and in fact I am concentrating on the real engine instead of think too much to my custom scene editor, because I already have the right tool to do the job.
Compliments like that run down like handwarm oil, very flattering says my ego :).
Yes the engine is called Ainur Engine which is an open source game engine I'm writing in my spare time.
I should release the 0.1.0 version in the next one or two months - there are still a lot of things to do, for example PhysX with TSM doesn't play as nice as with ETM (although I had some problems with ETM too, for example half of the crate mesh was under the terrain), I still have to implement PSSM shadows, the grass colour is bad it seems it can't load it from the ETbase.png file (it did in a previous attempt, dunno what I screwed up) and I'm planning to implement my water instead of using Hydrax which seems slow. So a lot of things that needs to be done but I am slowing putting all the pieces together for a first release.

I actually started the engine with a kind of game in mind: outdoor FPS, but I want to make something I can use in every game of this kind and maybe let it evolve in a more general purpose engine.
I always had a dream about an engine with dynamic weather (it would be really cool to slowly cover the terrain with snow too but I don't know how to do it or if it's even possible), water and vegetation!
There's a simple FPS which I am writing to test the engine but it has no story at all, not that it's always needed for FPS games (I just have to find a good villain and let the player kill every thing is moving on the screen :)
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by sisyphus »

Hey Nauk, I was wondering you had any info on the Ogre model (i.e. not just the head) that is being created?
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC1b - Update1! - Pg.6]

Post by Nauk »

@plfiorini: Looking forward to test your first release, definately makes me curious :) About the water, Hydrax is very nice and a powerful water library and has evolved nicely since Xavivy started it, kudos to that, I really like it, but of course it comes with an FPS tax, especially on older systems like most of the more sophisticated water simulations. One of the reasons I first started implementing colour-painting into Artifex, because you can take a fps-cheap simple shader and paint a static water effect / colours under the surface, doesn't look as nice as a fine tuned Hydrax setting, but good enough imho for having it at nearly Zero FPS costs, which is especially for MMO setups very handy where you have a hard time predicting how much more FPS you might need because 200 players could be gathering at the same spot, something that can happen even in small community games. So what is your water setup like?

@sisyphus: Thank you for the interest - the ogre body is a WIP done by my fiancee DragonSnail and not quite ready yet for public release, the low poly version is close to be finished but still has some exporter quirks.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.

Post by Nauk »

And there it is, always more time consuming than expected, but quality goes first and our main policy is not to release before we are not really satisfied with what we release. So what's new in 0.90 RC2? Despite it was mainly planned for it being "just" a bugfix & stability release we couldn't resist to add at least a little bit:

A lot of work went into perking the loader and tuning it to be able to load fully featured Artifex-Scenes with the basic plain Ogre Terrain Scenemanager, in short you don't need to include ETM anymore in your project unless you want to deform or edit the terrain with your game or application (note: to state the obvious, you will still need pagedgeometry if you want the paged grass). Means splatting and normalmapping of 9 different textures at once on good ol' TSM :). You can comfortably decide via "define" switch which terrain manager you want to use. The loader now has also been tested with several compilers and the latest 2 ogre versions. So it should compile out of the box with, VS2005 / 8.0, VS2008 / 9.0, MinGW C::B, Ogre 1.49 and Ogre 1.61; there are premade project files included.

Artifex itself got many smaller bugfixes, apart from the dds support everything users reported to us has been fixed. DDS textures still require the work-around and are due for the next release. The drop-to-ground option has been reimplemented and works better than before. Another new feature alongside with the new loader is the export TSM settings button that will save a standard Ogre terrain config file. A functionality that has also been added to the general saving function, means whenever you save your entire project the terrain.cfg is written by default too.

Another round of improvement went into the model-pack, many of them have been overhauled a bit and the textures improved. Also there are 2 new stone models included now. All models have been resized to match a consistent standard of 10 Units = 1 meter. There is a txt file in the model folder listing the size for each model.

To stay with the eye-candy topic: our demo zone being a permanent WIP, has gotten several new areas too check it out:

Image Image
Image Image


As always you can find it here:
Artifex Terra 3d 0.90 b RC2 - Free Community Edition

Note: For the people with odd connection problems we will add rapidshare and .torrent mirrors asap, just give us some time to be 100% sure the installer is ok.

We sincerely hope you like the changes!

Enjoy /Nauk :)
Last edited by Nauk on Tue Dec 14, 2010 1:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by Dibalo »

Absolutely stunning! :shock:
Keep up good working! :mrgreen:
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by MCin22 »

Impressive as always :D. Congratulations!
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by jmd »

Thanks for the update!
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by Nauk »

@Dibalo & MCin22: Thanks a lot, I am trying :)

@jmd: You are welcome :)
Last edited by Nauk on Fri Mar 20, 2009 2:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by NoodlesOnMyBack »

WOW... im impressed.
Im specially interested in the pimped TSM you mentioned, because my game doesnt requiered realtime deformation, and in the demos TSM runs really fast.
Are you getting a performance boost when using TSM?
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by Nauk »

@Noodles: Thanks - I hope you will like it! and I have to admit I haven't benchmarked the TSM performance at all, so I don't know if it is actually faster, time to find out :)

3 more things while I am at it, that I forgot to point out. The mountains in the screenshot are mainly modelled with the experimental shaping tools you get by pressing F8, the tools 0 to 3 seem to be pretty useful and as it looks like make it into the next version with their own button. You can flip through the tools by pressing F8, you see which tool you got in the console window, right clicking while being in that mode is a very strong 4x blur mixed blur and flatblur tool.

Since a couple of people asked now, we will make a loader demo with pagedgrass soon.
Last edited by Nauk on Fri Mar 20, 2009 2:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by NoodlesOnMyBack »

I installed ArtifexTerra but it crashes when im loading the demo scene:

Image

Code: Select all

01:58:10:  *   CPU ID: AuthenticAMD: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+
01:58:10: D3D9 : RenderSystem Option: Rendering Device = NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
01:58:10: D3D9 : RenderSystem Option: Allow NVPerfHUD = No
01:58:10: D3D9 : RenderSystem Option: Anti aliasing = None
01:58:10: D3D9 : RenderSystem Option: Floating-point mode = Fastest
01:58:10: D3D9 : RenderSystem Option: Full Screen = No
01:58:10: D3D9 : RenderSystem Option: Rendering Device = NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
01:58:10: D3D9 : RenderSystem Option: VSync = No
01:58:10: D3D9 : RenderSystem Option: Video Mode = 1024 x 768 @ 32-bit colour
About TSM, now i tested a little bit, and its using an insane amount of video memory, i have a crappy PC, but there are 9x2 1024x1024 images for splatting, and the coverage maps and the others are like over 8mb each.
What i did was to take the material of TSM and put it on the Forest example of paged geometry to see it running, and its not bad, but kinda slow, i think i'll test it more anyway.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.

Post by Nauk »

About the crash: A 6600 should be able to run shader model 2? Anyway there is the old 1.1 shader that should work: http://www.artifexterra.com/ ... /tmpl_classic_etm_9_textures.zip , although I really would like to get it working with the new shader and cards like a 6600, looking at the screenshot of the crash you nearly got it loaded anyway, so it can't be much. One thing I am suspecting is that I might do something wrong creating the textures manually or it has to do with the Ogre 1.4 and the nvidia driver problem. Shot in the dark, you could try 2 things to make it run: a) compile the loader sample and run it with ogre 1.61 b) open the ETTerrain.material and in the splatting pass hardcode the textures from Splatting0 to splatting0.png.

About the texture sizes and terrain settings: they are intentionally left "big" so people have meat to be able to still scale them to their likings or modify them with an image processing program. Same for the model textures, they are all 1024px with no compression, just scale them down. Same with the terrain settings, just adjust it to your likings in the terrain tab to the right.
Last edited by Nauk on Tue Dec 14, 2010 2:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by NoodlesOnMyBack »

Code: Select all

01:58:10:    - Max vertex program version: vs_3_0
01:58:10:    - Max fragment program version: ps_3_0
Im going to try that out.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by Nauk »

Ok after a lot of blind testing and some error reports from other people I can sort of reproduce the bug when I run 3 or 4 instances of Artifex at once I get the same crash and I seem to see on your screenshot its the same address. Right now I don't think it is a shader problem, but some messed up timing on the initialisation on slower machines, trying to access something that isn't loaded yet - I won't rest untill I found out what exactly. :)

Trying to locate it I ran a test on a very old laptop Sempron 3000+ 800 mhz, 128 (!!!) mb ram, 32 mb SiS mobile graphics, Win XP and to my big surprise it did not crash but loaded properly, no splatting textures, but the rest worked fine at a stunning 3FPS - loading time around 15 minutes, yay :D.

Anyway what I can recommend from that is, definately to update your winxp to latest, get the latest directx and drivers and shutdown all unnecessary stuff that runs in the background, also check your starting environment -> start -> execute -> msconfig , install artifex with the runtime coming with it. When you run Artifex, make sure you don't have 36 other programs running at the same time, especially not the big memory consumers.

Artifex definately is resource hungry, but it can run fine on older systems like mine: Athlon 3400+ (single core), 2GB ram, Nvidia 7600 GS 256mb and with that I get an average between 40 and 50 FPS in the demo scene.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by Buckcherry »

Hi everybody,

I have been reading this post but I can't find information about if it is capable of loading a huge terrain, similar to the PLSM2 plug-in.

Can it?.

Thanks.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by Nauk »

Hey Buckcherry, no sorry Artifex can not load or handle paged terrains yet. The max I have been successfully testing it with is 15.000 x 15.000 Ogre units if that is enough for you Artifex will do fine, if you need bigger, try Ogitor, the PLSM2 support could be working by now.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [0.90RC2b - TSM out! - Pg.7]

Post by xadhoom »

Nauk wrote: if you need bigger, try Ogitor, the PLSM2 support could be working by now.
Thanks for mentioning Ogitor, Nauk! :)

Unfortunately PLSM2 support is not fully integrated in Ogitor yet but soon will after porting to wxWidget. (http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/viewt ... =29&t=9319)

But 15kx15k sounds quiet huge and maybe yet enough :wink:

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