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

hike1 · Post by **hike1** » Sat Jul 19, 2008 9:21 pm

This works well, except I need .raw files, I can't make one out of
the etterrain.png that Neoaxis engine will swallow. Neoaxis also
uses alpha layers, I've made these out of colored layers that
the battlefield 2 editor makes, looks like your app does something similar. Any idea how to get .raw out of
your .png's?

hike1 · Post by **hike1** » Sat Jul 19, 2008 9:49 pm

Never mind, I got a .raw file by going through l3dt. It shows up
in Photoshop but not Neoaxis.

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Sun Jul 20, 2008 3:41 pm

The 16bit grayscale image conversion is a pain - I yet have to find a proper tool that works for all cases myself, most applications only open it and then silently convert it to 8 bit grayscale which is definately not what you want. As soon as I have found a reliable solution I will try to integrate it into Artifex.

But meanwhile:
ImageMagick could work for you: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php a very powerful commandline tool supporting many formats and conversion.

Cinepaint is a Gimp spinoff, specialized on high end formats (16 and 32 bit), so far only mac and linux, but VERY promissing for the purpose: http://www.cinepaint.org/

Here is a list of PNG converters: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapcv.html

Hope that helps a little

ppClarity · Post by **ppClarity** » Sun Jul 20, 2008 3:56 pm

Last go-round I had with Cinepaint about a year ago had me run away screaming. Cinepaint was forked from Gimp specifically because of the hard 8-bit/channel limitation. However ...

2.5 Release Notes wrote:What's New in GIMP 2.5

The most notable change in GIMP 2.5 happened under the hood. The color tools in GIMP have been ported to GEGL. This does not yet have much impact on the user experience but it is a first and important step forward. With full GEGL integration GIMP will finally get support for higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing.

...

Full notes

2.5.x is their development version so tread carefully. Hopefully 2.6 will emerge soon.

hike1 · Post by **hike1** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 2:21 pm

Never mind, I got a .raw file by going through l3dt. It shows up
in Photoshop but not Neoaxis.

Now it shows up, at http://terrymorgan.net/download.htm 'heightmap
painting with battlefield 2' it shows how to get the 16 bit heightmap.raw's
Neoaxis needs. Your splatting maps are better, Battlefield 2's had to be
assembled from 4 quarters.

I wonder if the painting would go faster on a faster machine,
mine's 1.5 GHZ and it's very slow.

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 3:58 pm

I have a 3400+ Single Core AMD Sempron, a NVidia 6800/512 and 2 GB Ram ( -> far from topnotch ) and the painting does run pretty fluent here, terrainshaping, texture- and colourpainting, no problem. What is really slow is the colourtools (painting with filters) on my system, but you can still work with it. So a faster machine will likely speed the painting a lot.

I am going to have a look at the Terry Morgan tutorial, good you found a solution.

Post by **CABAListic** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 5:19 pm

A simple trick to speed up painting and terrain editing is to do them at a lower update rate than your framerate. 20 updates per second are quite sufficient for real-time editing and help keep the framerate high. So this might be worth considering if you are not doing it already. ETL v3, btw, will do this implicitly if you tell it to do so

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 7:47 pm

Nice one! No, not doing that yet and definately very useful, thanks Cabalistic

madstork91 · Post by **madstork91** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:31 am

Hello,

I am currently working on some terrain for the openfrag project and I was recently made aware of your editor.

So far the results have been awesome

Thanks for your work!

Known bugs:

The boil does in fact get very wacky with its pressure.
The scale mode for meshes mentioned within the program seems to be interestingly non inactive
Occasionally after working in mesh mode and switching, the used mesh then appears as a huge mesh over the cursor.

And Now for the main one with the post:

After I plugged in my wacom to work on something else the program has been acting strangely.

While it was plugged in I could access the mesh mode with just a ctrl + m instead of what I had to do before which was a ctrl+shift+m
After plugging it in I also have to hit esc to be able to select a mesh while in mesh mode even after ive switched modes. (not sure if this is a bug)
After placing a mesh and saving the .cfg will have the data for the placed mesh but it will not render upon reloading the file.

Since Ive taken the wacom out and rebooted a few times.
For the first time I enter mesh mode I have to press ctrl+shift+m but after that all I have to hit is ctrl+m
The HUGE model above the now occurs more often.
and still: After placing a mesh and saving the .cfg will have the data for the placed mesh but it will not render upon reloading the file.

The weird thing about that last one is that I can load the example folder just fine. Something is wrong when comes to loading a new one with meshes.

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:18 am

Hey Madstork, thanks for the feedback and I am happy you like it, also thanks for the bug finds and good description. Let's have a look:

Boilmode: I need to find a senseful hardcap for the pressure factor, the wackyness comes because boil is brush and pressure sensitive, means the white value of the brush-image affects the pressure too, untill it is capped I suggest to check out different brush / pressure combinations and see what works best together.

Meshscaling: Is very urgent and on top of my list, it will be reworked and improved very soon. The hughe mesh might have to do with the steprate setting, I will look into it.

Meshmode & Shiftkey: Meshmode is supposed to be accessed with Ctrl + M, that you need Ctrl+Shift+M for it is weird, but might be I forgot to init the shiftflag to false and it gets flipped.

Saving / Loading of placed meshes: There are 2 reasons why it could not be loading, but I thought I had eliminated them. No.1 check if the Entityname, first line of the datablock, is already existing, Entitynames are generated randomly, and there is a check to prevent double names, but something might have slipped. No.2 the loader is choking on a linebreak, should actually have been fixed, but check the file, see if the first entity starts on top of the file and there are no empty lines between the datablocks. You could also post the file in question. I will look into it again and make the loader more tolerant to things like that.

Artpad problems: Which Wacom are you using and on what system? So far it has been tested with Intous3 on WinXP, latest Wacom drivers and Graphire2 on Win2k latest Wacom drivers, both worked fine. If you are up for it we can try to locate that problem more detailed in a chat session or so, since I am very interested in working stuff like that out

hike1 · Post by **hike1** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 2:37 pm

20 updates per second are quite sufficient for real-time editing and help keep the framerate high.

My framerate is 9! And 20 is the lowest. Gimp 2.46 will load separate
channels on the coverage .pngs, not quite sure how to get
them into separate .pngs that Neoaxis layers requires, be
good to have a free tool.

The Wacom Graphire2 works on this machine. I dread
putting in a new motherboard/cpu, this machine is 6 yrs old,
probably requires different memory, who knows what else,
pci-express, etc.

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 3:17 pm

madstork91 wrote:After placing a mesh and saving the .cfg will have the data for the placed mesh but it will not render upon reloading the file.

Ok, I knew it was something silly, just open the zonesettings.cfg and set these

Code: Select all

LoadStatics=1
LoadMovables=1
LoadMobiles=1
LoadGroundcover=1

to 1

. I set it to 0 testing something and forgot to set it back to 1 as default...

madstork91 · Post by **madstork91** » Sat Jul 26, 2008 3:44 pm

THANKS!

I will be sure to hit you up either in here or in an IM with results! I am also going to try some of your back blending suggestions. Ty!

hike1 · Post by **hike1** » Tue Jul 29, 2008 1:55 am

I tried it on a Sempron 1.6 GHZ, it was zippy.

http://terrymorgan.net/images/game_shot5.jpg
http://terrymorgan.net/images/game_shot6.jpg
http://terrymorgan.net/images/game_shot7.jpg

rogerdv · Post by **rogerdv** » Sun Aug 10, 2008 2:53 pm

Tried on a Celeron 2.6Mhz, IGP ATI 200M Xpress with 64Mb RAM. Got around 5 FPS at 800x600, but I think some gui elements are not designed for such low resolution.

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Sun Aug 10, 2008 7:57 pm

I will do some performance tuning for the next version, also put render distance, pixel error, etc to the general config file so you can really downtweak it for much lower hardware requirements.

No the UI is not 100% optimized designed for 800x600 but you should be able to work, and everything is accessible - however not very comfortable. I use that resolution sometimes for debugging. A good trick to gain some space here is to use the TAB key and toggle the statusbar and / or the sidebar invisible. You can always use one of Navis great advantages and modify the UI to your likings, it is plain HTML and some javascript, feel free to skin away

.

It should be possible to go down to even much lower resolutions and as far as I saw you aren't bound to the native resolution values, and maybe use 16bit color setting to squeeze out the last FPS.

Devil N · Post by **Devil N** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 7:19 pm

Today I went from a Geforce 6600GT to a Geforce 7600GT; not such a big step in hardware, but it made a major difference for Artifex Terra's performance. Suddenly the program went from an unusable 2-3 fps to a nice and comfortable 50+ fps. I'm not going to complain, now that I can finally get some use out of this tool, but it is odd that the performance was so bad on the 6600GT.

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 7:51 pm

The newer card is able to render all 9 texture splatts in 1 single pass, while the older card is probably using the fallback technique having to render it in 3 passes, that makes quite a difference.

Post by **CABAListic** » Thu Aug 14, 2008 8:39 pm

No, the 6600GT can handle shader model 3, so it wouldn't have used any fallback. I once tested about 30 splatting textures on the 6600GT and it still worked somewhat acceptably. My guess is on some sort of driver issue or the like.

Devil N · Post by **Devil N** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 8:07 am

I guess a driver issue is the most likely cause. I had fairly recent drivers (as in, a few months old) installed for my 6600GT, but I updated them to the most recent ones for my 7600GT. The 6600GT will be migrated to another computer, so I'll try and see there what it does on Artifex with the latest nVidia drivers.

rubasurex · Post by **rubasurex** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 3:51 am

I'm just wondering if ArtifexTerra is still available for download. The link given in the op doesn't seem to work.

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 4:51 am

I just tested, and it worked, but since I got more complains the download not working or freezing halfway I changed the location to a different mirror:
Download - should work without problems clicking whatever version you want. Please try again and let me know if it worked.

rubasurex · Post by **rubasurex** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 8:27 am

Nope. Everytime I click the link I get an "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" error.

Even tried going to the forum on your web site and then searching for the post manually, but your entire forum gives me this same error.

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 9:02 am

I sent you a PM with another link. The forum should work since it is an unmodded simplemachines board - strange. I hope that solves it for you

Bunz · Post by **Bunz** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 4:15 am

Nauk wrote:@Lee: I definately have in mind to make it more useful and attractive for other projects, a plugin system and scriptable in- and export are on the todo list. I might even opensource it, right now I just want to let it sink in a bit and go back to gamecoding and brood over it - either way, one or the other is en route.

The only ways it could possibly be made attractive to me is if you do indeed open source it, and if it is ported to linux and OpenGL.

Looks like a great tool besides these (current) show-stoppers.