Espadon Online - English Forum Section Opened!

[Bonkahe]

Out of curiosity, how does the lod on your terrain work? does it have zones and the further away you are the less polys it have? or is it based on how much detail is required for that area or some such?

[Espadon PR]

Hello Bonkahe.
Our world consists of cells. Each cell has its terrainpart.
Each terrainpart can get its own individual LOD Level. The Worldmanager determines it based on its paging and the position from the given calculation position (player).
The terrain itself is right now simply a grid of vertices.
For the LOD levels you only need to resize the grid itself. The terrains quadtree class (which helps sorting the vertices and speeding up the deformation) provides a fast methode ( getNearestVertex(Ogre::Vector2) - XZ only ) so you can easily create a smaller grid and form the vertices together.
Right now we only adjust the terrains index buffer to create the new terrain on the fly.
But this methode is a little older and not shown in the video/editor (to not accidently deform LOD terrain, which would of course result in a complete mess).

[Espadon PR]

Today we would like to present our second editor, ConanTheConverter ( CtC ), designed for our 3D team.
It helps the 3D artists to convert Ogres *.mesh files into our internal resource system, so it becomes useful for our own engines.
Its still under development, but some smaller tools so far are:
- open *.mesh files with double click out of the windows explorer (simple mesh viewer)
- editing materials
- converting submeshs to billboards
- handle all object related resource management
- generating collision meshs (not shown here)

We hope you like it:

[youtube]Ff6LexERl4M[/youtube]

[Espadon PR]

Hello again!
After a long time now, we can tell you: We are still here!
In the last weeks and months the team went through a lot of restructuring, because many long time team members had to leave us due to private reasons. The team had to cope with those huge gaps, but we managed to continue our work. We hope we can post future updates more regularly.
Of course we made great strides in all areas, considering the ogre part we advanced into a better structured rendering pipeline. Today we only want to show you one of the results from earlier this year, which shows all aspects of our graphical work.
Among other things it shows the combination of normalmapping, specularmapping, CSM + poisson disk filtering, bloom, depth of field, fxaa and per pixel fog.
We hope you like it.

[duststorm]

Hey, it's been a while since this thread has been active, but I have a question for the devs.
Do you use precomputed shadow maps for terrain self-shadowing, or are those shadows dynamic? And if you use precomputed shadows, do you have a good way to incorporate day/night transition lighting into your engine?

In my experiments with cascading shadow mapping I have found that self shadowing on large terrains does not work very well.

[Espadon PR]

Hello duststorm,
please excuse the delay, but as the news on our homepage states, espadon online is no longer active as it was before.
But I reply with the espadon online account to you, because your question referes to the engine of espadon online as it was before we split and when the screenshots were taken.
To your questions:
Yes, all shadows are computed in real time. We had some smaller issues with the terrain shadows too and still have a few here and there.
As said all shadows are computed at runtime, so there is no problem with a day/nicht system we faced until now.
We are currently working on deferred shading, a weather system with day and night and some other things like that. So there will be bigger changes in our pipeline as well and I can't predict the effect on the terrain shadows so far.
But the terrain itself is not treated anyway other than normal objects so far.
Hope this answers your questions, if not let me know.