Terrain renderer

[scrawl]

Wanted to show this for a while - terrain renderer I wrote for OpenMW

[youtube]2wnd9EuPJIY[/youtube]

Differences to Ogre::Terrain:
- Pages are merged and split on demand, very important to render a large world without having too many batches.
- Normals stored in vertices, not in texture, to allow per-vertex lighting and support older cards.
- Different LODs are seamlessly connected instead of using skirts.
- Supports realtime self shadows
- Supports infinite number of texture layers by adding more passes if required.
- FFP fallback
- Shader isn't hardcoded and uses shiny for preprocessing.

TODO:
- Background streaming
- Geomorphing to make LOD transitions smoother
- Error metrics

Code (~2k lines): https://github.com/OpenMW/openmw/tree/m ... ts/terrain

[Jabberwocky]

Nicely done!
Writing terrain code isn't for the faint of heart.
How do you find it performs compared to an ogre terrain of equivalent size?

[scrawl]

How do you find it performs compared to an ogre terrain of equivalent size?

That wouldn't really be a fair comparison

You can't make this world as a single Ogre::Terrain object because there'd be far too many layers.
So you'd have to start splitting it up into chunks that are small enough to have a reasonable amount of layers. After doing that, you'd have an insane batch count.
In my terrain system, this is solved by merging these small chunks if they are far away and rendering them with a composite map only, which pre-renders the layers so the amount of layers doesn't matter anymore. Batch count is < 50, so the performance is pretty great!

[syedhs]

Any precompiled binaries to download..?

[Nauk]

Nice work! - License being GPL3 I assume or?

[scrawl]

There is no standalone demo. License - GPL3.

[nevarim]

great work!!

[nevarim]

can be used on other project with only ogre?

[scrawl]

can be used on other project with only ogre?

Yeah that should be possible. What you'd need to do is implement the Storage class. You will need your own way of storing the terrain data (or generate it procedurally).

[scrawl]

I have added normal, specular & parallax mapping.
[youtube]t-NgplmbqpU[/youtube]
There are 2 important differences to Ogre::Terrain regarding this:
- normal & parallax mapping can be turned on/off separately for each layer. Useful if you only have those maps for some of the layers, or you want a layer to be completely flat.
- Instead of calculating the light contributions for each layer, the normals from all layers are "merged" and the final normal is used for lighting. While this isn't 100% accurate, it's virtually unnoticable and should be much faster (especially with more than one light - in my situtation, its 8 lights with 8+ layers, that'd be 8 instead of 8*8=64 lighting calculations...)

[bstone]

An interesting idea. Have you done any benchmarking to compare the simplified approach in its performance to the original one?

[jacmoe]

GPL is just /(#&¤(/&# useless!

You ought to be shot on the spot for announcing middle-ware with such a hideously ebola-ridden license.

If, however, you could release that part of your OpenMW engine under the MIT license, then we can start using it, improve it together and perhaps even make it the default terrain engine for Ogitor..
Oh, well...

I do understand that you want OpenMW to be GPL, that's ok.

Come to think of it, I actually managed to convince the Daimonin developers to release their tiled terrain scenemanager under LGPL:
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 62#p130862

If you are in a position to do that, of course.

Eternal glory!
Remember that.

Edit:
What piqued my interest was your comment in the Ogre Terrain Capabilities topic:

Ogre::Terrain does not scale well at all. It does not support varying heightmap resolutions depending on the distance, like you'd want for a very large world. This is one of the reasons I wrote a custom terrain system, which you can find here.

Damn you.

[N0vember]

I'm starting to get lost between all the Terrain solutions out there, their differences, their advantages.

So far we have :
- Terrain component, seems the less interesting to me (built-in)
- Volume component, with voxel-based terrain features : overhangs, caves etc... (built-in)
- Scape engine by decarpentier, very powerful GPU edition capabilities
- VoxelTerrain by markus, again, voxel-based
- This one, which strong point seems to be a "classic" terrain (not voxel) that can stream really big worlds with detailed texturing

An in-depth comparison would be cool one day, I really don't know what I'm gonna use

[al2950]

I'm starting to get lost between all the Terrain solutions out there, their differences, their advantages.

So far we have :
- Terrain component, seems the less interesting to me (built-in)
- Volume component, with voxel-based terrain features : overhangs, caves etc... (built-in)
- Scape engine by decarpentier, very powerful GPU edition capabilities
- VoxelTerrain by markus, again, voxel-based
- This one, which strong point seems to be a "classic" terrain (not voxel) that can stream really big worlds with detailed texturing

An in-depth comparison would be cool one day, I really don't know what I'm gonna use

I second that, I am also a bit lost when comes to the finer differences and details of these terrain engines.

[stealth977]

Well, we are looking for a better terrain renderer for Ogitor 15.10 a.k.a Malazgirt (Ogitor with Ogre v2 and OGF) since we are having too many problems with Ogre::Terrain.

As I wrote in one of my posts:

"Jack of all trades, master of none" is some famous saying you all know.

The problem with Ogre::Terrain is exactly like the saying, Ogre::Terrain is actually "Jack of all trades, master of none". It tries to do too many things, tries to meet all kinds of demands from the user:

- Different material shaders?, hell yeah!
- Awkward terrain orientation? hell yeah!
- Multiple vertex definitions? hell yeah!
....the list goes on....

but, the result is: bloated, slow, inefficient Terrain Rendering Implementation...So bloated that even if I wanted to create my own implementation, It would be much easier to start from scratch than to take it as a base and modify...

So, we need a Terrain Renderer which can handle large terrains (does not need to page everything, keeping all heightmap in memory is not expensive nowadays, but blendmaps sure need to be paged) with following properties:
- Fast Enough rendering with lod
- Multiple blendmaps/layers
- Self Shadowing and Shadowmaps
- Morphing vertices during lod changes
- Need to support run-time editing of blendmaps and heightmaps
- Opensource compatible non-intrusive license

If any of you know a renderer with above capabilities or have one they created, please lets us know and we can include/have full support for it...

[jacmoe]

Just wanted to mention that IMO OpenMW is the coolest project using Ogre that I know of.

This is because Morrowind has to be the best game I've ever played experienced!
And because it is amazing what you guys have accomplished until now.

[scrawl]

I get your frustrations, but you could ask nicely before saying I "ought to be shot on the spot"?

I do understand that you want OpenMW to be GPL, that's ok.

I don't personally care for the GPL, however changing license at this point is next to impossible, all 100+ contributors would have to agree... assuming we can even still reach all of them. The license was chosen before I joined the project. Now we're stuck with it.

However, as for the Terrain code, it was written by me exclusively, so I hereby release it under the MIT license.

By the way, the video player used in openmw is also released under MIT.

[jacmoe]

I get your frustrations, but you could ask nicely before saying I "ought to be shot on the spot"?

I know I have clunky way of asking nicely. I do have a grudge to bear against the GPL for middle-ware. 'Diplomat' is not exactly my middle-name.
Has probably to do with the fact that I am Danish. We have a weird sense of humor.
I apologize for having offended you.

That said:

What a wonderful gift, Scrawl

You really took me by surprise.
Am definitely going to integrate it into Ogitor, if it's okay with you.
<edit>
And now I feel really guilty. I guess I had it coming.
</edit>

[frostbyte]

"ought to be shot on the spot"

he meant using this...http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free- ... age2323317

By the way, the video player used in openmw is also released under MIT.

this is a must have in the new OgreADDON repo...http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 25#p514142

[scrawl]

this is a must have in the new OgreADDON repo...http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 25#p514142

Why? There is an active repository on github... having another one would only cause confusion, and one of them would get outdated eventually.
If you want to contribute, just send a pull request

[jacmoe]

Now that I effectively bullied it to be relicensed I will clone the repository at Github, make a copy of the terrain component and make sure to issue pull requests. Should we decide to use it for Ogitor then we will most probably going to add at least GPU editing like in Scape.
And we are definitely going to port it to Ogre 2.0 as soon as possible.

The code should be attributed to Jannik 'Scrawl' Heller from the OpenMW team, right?


<edit>
Ogreaddons is primarily for projects without an active maintainer.
OpenMW does not fall into that category

[Kojack]

The original Morrowind terrain was one of the more interesting ones I've reverse engineered. If I remember correctly (it was a long time ago) it was something like 65x65 heights in a land block with each height being a signed 8 bit offset from the height to the left, except the first height of each row came from the first height of the row below it, and the whole land block having a float initial height.

(I could rant about OpenMW's GPL and how it's blocked adding Oculus support which would have been awesome, but I won't. This is about terrain)

[frostbyte]

sorry, i'm a bit ignorant when it comes to git/hg...
just figured it will be better if the coolest plugins would be gathered under one umbrella...
and this one is definitely one of them...
offcourse, you are right about the confusion that can be created
apperantly their isn't an easy automatic solution to bitbucket<-->git sync
found this http://www.metallapan.se/bitsynchub/ but it works the other way around...

anyway thanks for MIT-ing the terrain component, i also wanted to try it but the GPL scared me away...

Ogreaddons is primarily for projects without an active maintainer.

ok..thanks for clearing...

[jacmoe]

Something like this? ->

Code: Select all

/*/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/// An
///        ___                        __    __ 
///       /___\_ __   ___ _ __   /\/\/ / /\ \ \
///      //  // '_ \ / _ \ '_ \ /    \ \/  \/ /
///     / \_//| |_) |  __/ | | / /\/\ \  /\  / 
///     \___/ | .__/ \___|_| |_\/    \/\/  \/  
///           |_|                              
///                 file
///
/// Copyright (c) Jannik Heller (scrawl) of the OpenMW project (openmw.org)
///
/// The MIT License
///
/// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
/// of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
/// in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
/// to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
/// copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
/// furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
///
/// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
/// all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
///
/// THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
/// IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
/// FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
/// AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
/// LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
/// OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
/// THE SOFTWARE.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////*/

[scrawl]

Code: Select all

/*
 * Copyright (c) 2015 scrawl <scrawl@baseoftrash.de>
 *
 * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
 * of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
 * in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
 * to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
 * copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
 * furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
 *
 * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
 * all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

 * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
 * IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
 * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
 * AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
 * LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
 * OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
 * THE SOFTWARE.
 */