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

[plfiorini]

Here's a patch for PagedGeometry to make it more realistic
http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/viewt ... rag#p43796

[Nauk]

@Mcin22: Thanks a lot for the nice compliment , and I think the previous post answers your question for the PG part, the rest of the meshes are just std ogre node/entities and respond to the light.

@plfiorini: Thanks a lot for pointing to the patch

[plfiorini]

@MCin22: Patching PG to enable lighting makes a really good looking grass with Caelum. I just can't get dynamic lighting working with ETM, I hope the ArtifexTerra author will get it soon so I will be able to understand where and what I am doing wrong.

[MCin22]

Well, I'll give a try when 0.90 version will be out . I'm making my game with Caelum so ... grass - (Artifex will be using grass form PG) I really believe -will be great. (sorry for my bad English)

[amigoface]

look awesome !

but any news on this ?

and another question :

can i use this for a large terrain (flight-sim like game) ?

thanks

[Nauk]

Thank you Amigoface About the news, I am right now doing the final polishing, shining and bug-tracking, so as it looks release is due later today - finally! As for big terrains, the biggest I have been working with and using for our game-project is 15.000x15.000 Ogre units per ETM terrain instance. As I understand it you can have more than one ETM-terrain unit in a scene, but I haven't tested that, and you would have to write your own paging and stitching, or wait for ETM3 which is supposed to support that and which very likely will be supported by Artifex.

[sisyphus]

Any updates? I, for one, am eagerly awaiting the release!

[Nauk]

Ok short update: We (2 coders, 1 artist) working marathon-style (lot of coffee / little sleep) on the final polish since mid-last week, doing hardcore-testing and final bugfixing, the TODO list keeps shrinking and growing at the same time ever since we started...Anyway right now we got all major and complicated problems done with a safe check to them and the list has taken a very determined course towards the shrinking side, carefully said So right now we are pretty close to release, not predicting again exactly how close, but close Thanks for the patience to everyone that is waiting! - Oh and we just invented Day 2.0 with 48 hours.

[Wretched_Wyx]

Wish I had other programmers who would go on binges with me. I stay up for days at a time, regularly. For years now. Initially I thought it would weigh down on my health, but I've come to learn it's more... well it's relative. I stay up for 60 hours, sleep for 15-20. Fun!

Anyway, I'm loving AT. Keep up the good work, and be sure and not go south with love for your project. It's a gem, and I'd hate to see it die out once it just started getting good (like say, Simple Paged Terrain did).

[Nauk]

Ok here it finally is, weeks later than anticipated but the famous TODO.txt kept growing and growing while I was trying to shrink it, counting the issues we worked down - they sum up to a proud 47 points... anyway we are done, and I learned a good lesson:

Making things work is one thing, but making things work halfway comfortable, fail-safe and usable for random unknown users is an entire different story, actually I would go as far as to say it is way more effort - putting it into numbers it runs somewhere around 1:2 to 1:3.

Enough ranting here is what the new and shiny 0.90RC1 beta has in new features compared to 0.80 - most of it previously announced but here is what is really live and working properly:

• Widgets for editing all basic scene settings: terrain, sky, water, camera, fog, light, etc.
• Normalmapping and dynamic light support.
• Projectmanager where you can load scenes from folders, export baked maps, save the entire scene or just parts of it single. Create new scene projects by choosing a folder with a standard win32 filedialogue: The template will be copied out from an open template folder which you can edit and customize to your own likings.
• Meshdecal with a small custom shader that converts the current brush into a half transparent texture to represent it in rotation, size and shape for more exact painting and shaping.
• PagedGeometry grass support, with the most relevant settings editable. Automated colourmap generation in case of lack. Grass painting demo preview to 1.0 Indy (works, but saving disabled).
• Entirely overhauled object-editing, with a new object settings dialogue to edit everything manually and add infinite custom value pairs to each object.
• Entirely reworked the mouse-based object placement and editing to make it more consistent and user-friendly.
• New SQlite based object storage system and reworked loading and saving of the scene data. The loader should be pretty robust and has fail-safe values for all settings, so loading Artifex 0.80 or older scenes is possible and will update automatically to the new standard when you save them again.
• Sample 2-way Gtk-PHP based standalone dotScene with userdata - ArtifexScene converter. With the ease and power of PHP and the support for many database apis aswell as XML parsing, it should be very simple to adapt it to your own custom format. Otherwise just use it or enhance the dotScene output. (Many thanks to Eliah for making it happen).
• Toolbar for all basic editor modes.
• Progressbar for all time consuming features, filters, loading and saving.
• WASD movement Q-E to look up and down.
• Mousewheel Zoom in/out.
• Updated inside manual covering most of the features aswell as a updated hotkey-list.
• Basic gravity and vertical object-collision with MOC, so you can walk on bridges, objects etc to get a better "game" feeling for your scene.
• Warning and modal dialogues for saving, quitting and other permanently impacting actions.
• Improved blur-tool.
• 180 degree brushflipping.
• New tower model.
• Various UI and usability improvements. Resized all UI elements to power of 2 so the odd distortions on some cards should be gone and past now.
• Many under the hud improvements and a nearly completely reworked codebase so adding new features in the future will be a lot easier and faster, also matured and stabilized the whole application a lot.

And of course some screenshots:



Click to enlarge.

Ok I hope that covers it all, I might have forgotten something and I am pretty sure there are plenty of bugs and odds left to discover, but I had to force myself to stop improving things or there wouldn't be release today either .

Here is the download:
http://www.artifexterra.com/


System requirements are halfway actual hardware and a shader-model 2.0+ compatible 3D card with 256 mb graphic memory. We dropped the support for cards below Shader2.0.

The new Artifex-Scene-Loader for 0.90 is still in the works and will be released the next couple of days (promissed it won't be weeks ). The loader now is integrated into Artifex and serves as loader there too, so it will be easier to maintain it and decouple it whenever updates and changes are made.

Known bugs:
- Flipping through the textures in texture studio might crash to desktop, so be sure to save your data before you use it. Will be fixed in RC2.

Note: the ogre-model is not included, yet, but DragonSnail has picked up working on it again.

Enjoy /Nauk

[sisyphus]

Huzzah, been looking forward to this! Cheers Nauk

[jacmoe]

Totally impressive!

And you tell Dragonsnail to get on that Ogre model RSN!

[MCin22]

Really useful thing! Well, because I've got old graphics card, the texture of terrain is white, but on the other PC I can see that Artifex is even more amazing . Good luck with another versions (and RC2 ).

[Nauk]

@sisyphus: Thank you, I hope it is worth the wait

@jacmoe: Thank you, that is much more than I hoped for - About the Ogre model, the lowpoly version is basically ready modelled & textured and has 2 animations done, what is now missing is the highpoly version to bake the normalmaps from, but since she started again, right now it is only a matter of enough sparetime and encouragement like this certainly speeds it up

@MCin22: Thank you for the compliment About the old graphic card, you can try to use the shaders from the last Artifex Version and replace the current ones, that works for me, you can even copy the old shaders into the template folder and then you can create new scenes with it. Artifex doesn't care which ones you use, you could also try to remove the decal pass from the old shader, that should give some extra rendering speed. If you don't get it to show, I will pack you a zone-template without normalmapping and upload it.

[jacmoe]

@jacmoe: Thank you, that is much more than I hoped for - About the Ogre model, the lowpoly version is basically ready modelled & textured and has 2 animations done, what is now missing is the highpoly version to bake the normalmaps from, but since she started again, right now it is only a matter of enough sparetime and encouragement like this certainly speeds it up

That's good to hear!
I've waited almost 5 years for an Ogre model, so .. no rush. I know it will happen some day.

[DragonSnail]

Glad you like the ogre! ^_^

One thing I can promise: it wont take another five years to complete it!

The DragonSnail

[MCin22]

@Nauk

Well, thanks for reply . I'm not really good with shaders (I'm quite a newbie). If you can and have time, you can send this . But you don't need to make this pack. I'll just check new version on friend's PC.

[Nauk]

coming right up

[Nauk]

Here it is: just unzip it to wherever you want a new zone, or replace the content of the current standard template with the content of this archive and you have a classic ETM2 shader without normal mapping but 9 textures:

http://www.artifexterra.com/ ... tmpl_classic_etm_9_textures.zip

[amigoface]

waooooooooooooh really great thing !!!!

i think that ArtifexTerra has all to become the "official" Ogre Scene editor

unfortunaly i had only a few minutes to play with it

in the meaning time i have some questions if possible :

- where is the ground level option for meshes that was in the previous version ?
- i had some difficulties to place my objects when i scale the terrain a lot (ogre units)
(i need a large terrain for a flightsim like game)
- any news about the loader ?


anyway congratulations for this great tool

[MCin22]

@Nauk

Thank you! I'll check this right now . I like Artifex, because I'm more artist than programmer .

EDIT:

And I'm also interested in loader, I can't find loader in version 0.90.

[Nauk]

@Amigoface: thaaaaaaaaaanks hehe - now that is some enthousiastic feedback! The loader is coming right up, I decoupled it last night, just gonna do some checking on some variables and NO polishing before I load it up, so you don't have to wait much longer. The "drop to ground" placement has been taken out temporarily and will be in RC2 again, you still can pop up the object properties dialogue for your object once it is placed and check the option and next time you load your scene it will be dropped to groundlevel. What problems did you have? The placement might need some number fine tuning as in making it slower and more sensitive, as a tip you can always press the Ctrl key down to get a slower and more fine resolving mouse, works for any placement or object editing action.

@MCin22: It is made with artists in mind, sitting next to an artist over 12 hours everyday seeing her work with 2D and 3D was very inspiring considering the workflow and usability, so I am very happy to hear my translation is working for other artists too About the loader, see what I wrote to Amigoface, it is being released today.

[Nauk]

Ok here is a first "quick & dirty" version:
http://www.artifexterra.com

It is a small Ogre / ETM 2.3.1 sample application + loader code, so you need ETM 2.3.1 or with some small modifications you can at least load the colourmap and the object-data with the standard TSM too. You can get ETM 2.3.1 here: http://www.oddbeat.de/wiki/etm

• it loads stabile and the sceneformat is ironed out
• it should also load older 0.80 scenes
• I left the database write methods in, so you don't have to reinvent them when you want to modify the object data or add something from your game / or application
• all loader relevant code is in source/loader and headers/loader the rest belongs to the sample app
• here is a list with sqlite - admin tools to manipulate your object-data outside artifex: http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=ManagementTools there are a lot of free ones along with commercial ones, even a firefox plugin
• checkout the StaticUtils.h there are some comfort wrappers for several ogre string functions you might find them useful in other places too

Known issues that will be fixed soon (tm):

• the code is still somewhat unclean, nothing big but some things could be structured a bit different
• objects that are read from an sqlite-file and are flagged static are still put in as normal scenenodes/entities and not as static geometry, i read in several places that it wouldn't make a performance difference because of the better culling of non-static objects, however, I will put the option back in and you can decide for yourself if you want to use it or not.

License of the loader is freeware for the most parts, SQlite is public domain, CppSqlite3 Wrapper has a BSD style license, see file headers for details.

I hope it works

/Nauk

[plfiorini]

You should also be able to load the coverage maps and splatting texture with TSM it's a matter of writing a custom material with a shader.
I got it working (splatting with 3 coverage and 9 textures with dynamic lighting) but then I restarted using ETM with poor results because that shader doesn't work because it's not using the right splatting textures.
I can't even get the default ETM shader or Artifex shader working because I see no textures - I'm planning to revert back to TSM and try to use ETM in the future only for the editor of my engine...
Anyway I will post my TSM shader which is able to load stuff made with ArtifexTerra.

[MCin22]

@Nauk

Well, thanks! And another (yes, another ) questions.

1. It's possible or will be possible to make a change in a terrain (like make a hole) while playing a game i nreal time (like in plot there is a hit and make a hole as a effect of for example attack? It's matter of Artifex or only ETL? I mean something like calling a function dug(x,y,howdeepitmustbe).

2. Can Artifex cooperate with, for example, Caelum? Loader is reading a whole scene into game, but the scene has got a static sky. So I'm not sure; it's possible to turn off this sky and use sky from Caelum?

3. About license, can I use Artifex for commercial project?

And another thing, you can add that Radeon 9200 is working with Artifex (with your pack, but it's working) (23 FPS). With grass it looks awesome , like an image.