Terrain System for a Flight Sim

[Vincent]

Hi all,

I am currently working on an arcade Flight Simulator with Ogre as the rendering engine. I played a little bit with the Terrain component but I am not sure if this component can do the job. Usually in a flight sim the player can be up to 10 km above the ground and from the movies I saw, you will be able to see the terrain pages appearing and vanishing.

Then I found this Thread and read about the PagedGeometry plugin, which looks very promising.

The third but also hardest way would be to develop my own Terrain System component or plugin for Ogre, but I doubt of getting a better result than Sinbad or the people from the PageGeometry group. And actually I would like to develop the game and not a new Terrain System if there are any which match my requirements.

Another important point to decide is the actuality and the maintenance of the component. I don't know if this is correct, but I think Ogre's Terrain System is mainly based on this article, which is from 2000. I don't know which technique the PagedGeomtery plugin is using. Ogre's Terrain System is developed by Sinbad who unfortuantely retired.

I would be very happy about some good advises how you would approach this task.

Thanks and Cheers
Vincent

[NotCamelCase]

There is this OGRE-based game you can check out. What you are asking seems to be possible as the guy there says they're using Terrain and Paged Geometry.

I love the flight combat genre a lot so it'd be nice to know of your progress. I'm also considering for one after my current project.

[c6burns]

I also use PagedGeometry from the Ogitor repo. My current project is kinda a skydiving sim, so it's similar to flight sim in some respects. Ogre's terrain component is great. It's one of the better terrain systems I've used, and that's comparing it to commercial middleware. The one sub-optimal thing about PagedGeometry is that it uses a 2d grid strategy. So it will work just fine, but as you fly around at high altitude it will still be managing pages as if you are on the ground. It would not be tough to change this to suit your needs, as PagedGeometry is well documented, logically structured, and not that much code when it comes down to it.

[Vincent]

Thanks for your answers.

I guess I understood something wrong. I thought that I have to choose between Ogre's Terrain System and the PagedGeometry plugin, but as I read your answers it sounds that they are used in conjunction. I have not read the PagedGeometry documentation, maybe I should do it

Cheers
Vince

[al2950]

Just in case there is some confusion I thought I would make it clear that there are 3 different paging libraries/components for Ogre which do different things, but sometimes people mix up the names!

• Ogre terrain component. Ogre's new terrain system
• Ogre paging component. Flexible paging interface which will work with the terrain component (I think!)
• Paged Geometry plugin. Used to render grass, forests, etc. - This is basically paging and billboarding and can work along with the new terrain component
• Paging Landscape scenemanager - This is another plugin and is a bit old now, it was used to rendered vast terrains but does not use the new terrain system.

Hope that clears up any confusion, if there was any! In short if you were to use the ogre terrain system with the paging component it would be fine for your fligtsim. If you wanted to add trees, etc the Paged Geometry plugin would be a good option.

[al2950]

Forgot to mention that this GSOC project might be of interest;
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=69553

Not sure if it was every merged with Ogre's main repo though..

**EDIT** Looks like it was merged into Ogre 1.9 (and above)

[Crashy]

As my game has been mentionned here, I can tell you that we are using the Ogre::Terrain plugin in BOMB.

I don't think it is well suited to make a "true" flight simulator, with a very large but still detailed map, but it can do the job in most case.

[Vincent]

Just in case there is some confusion I thought I would make it clear that there are 3 different paging libraries/components for Ogre which do different things, but sometimes people mix up the names!

• Ogre terrain component. Ogre's new terrain system
• Ogre paging component. Flexible paging interface which will work with the terrain component (I think!)
• Paged Geometry plugin. Used to render grass, forests, etc. - This is basically paging and billboarding and can work along with the new terrain component
• Paging Landscape scenemanager - This is another plugin and is a bit old now, it was used to rendered vast terrains but does not use the new terrain system.

Hope that clears up any confusion, if there was any! In short if you were to use the ogre terrain system with the paging component it would be fine for your fligtsim. If you wanted to add trees, etc the Paged Geometry plugin would be a good option.

Thanks for the explanation, now it is clear.

As my game has been mentionned here, I can tell you that we are using the Ogre::Terrain plugin in BOMB.

I don't think it is well suited to make a "true" flight simulator, with a very large but still detailed map, but it can do the job in most case.

Great game, I like the graphical style that is very similar to what I had in mind. My game idea is inspired by Crimson Skies but I want to add game mechanics from other genres which I don't want to talk about now. But I don't want to take my mouth to full, I will be happy if I can get a protoype running in my spare time. So again congrats to your very nice looking game.

Thanks to all for the support.

Cheers
Vincent

[drwbns]

You might want to look into cdlod - just google it. I know there's a couple of examples and articles about it.