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

A place to show off your latest screenshots and for people to comment on them. Only start a new thread here if you have some nice images to show off!
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Nauk
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Post by Nauk »

NoodlesOnMyBack wrote:And the performance its not very good with my Athlon 64 +3000 1,5 GB RAM and 6600GT, probably Navy's fault...
Out of curiosity and to clear up an old myth about Navi, I just made a comparison, loading the test-scene into a clean demo application without Navi and then comparing it to running the exact same testscene in Artifex: the difference between Ogre + Navi and Ogre without Navi is around 3- FPS if at all messurable.

The watershader takes around 10+ FPS (more than i actually thought). What makes a significant difference tho is the actual terrain dimensions. The testscene has 5000x5000 Ogre units and is 1667 Ogre units high, when I lower the height to 300 Ogre units the FPS increases by 50 to 60. That messured with a similar system (Athlon 3400+, 2GB, 6800XT) and Fraps.

You can toy around with the terrain-sizes in the zonesettings.cfg, you can also assign a different water material there to check out the difference.
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Post by NoodlesOnMyBack »

Yes, the '#' was the problem, i moved the folder and worked just fine.
About the Navi controls, yeah, that was a very vague assumption i made.
I also changed the terrain dimensions to 1000x and FPS went up from 9 to around 50.

Things to consider:
>Let the user create new maps inside the editor with user defined parameters.
>Add ETM dynamic lighting support (already done by SongOfTheWeave), but like an option.
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Post by Nauk »

Things to consider:
>Let the user create new maps inside the editor with user defined parameters.
>Add ETM dynamic lighting support (already done by SongOfTheWeave), but like an option.
Yep you are absolutely right, those important features and both are already on the todo list :). SongOfTheWeave has done a great job there working out the lightning topic and even the more generous he is sharing his knowledge on the ETM boards.
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Post by westpointer »

All the download URLs of Artifex Terra 3D do not work for me :cry:
Could you put it on some public repository like rapidshare that I can
access? Thanks a lot :)
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Post by Nauk »

http://www.artifexterra.com/

Check this one, works fine for me, but looking at the log files it seems like more people had the problem, might have to do with us migrating the webspace from IP to the http://www.artifexterra.com domain. Anyway I will parallel put it up on a public filehoster to mirror it in case that link doesn't work either. Would be great if you could try the one above first and let me know if it worked or not.

I hope that sorts it out for you :)
Last edited by Nauk on Tue Dec 14, 2010 1:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by westpointer »

Bad news, download failed :oops:
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Post by Nauk »

You can contact me on MSN, maybe we can work something out together.
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Post by Nauk »

The next version of our terrain editor is due to be released within the coming 10-14 days (if my comp doesn't fry again), here are some of the nicer screenshots to give you a preview of some of the new features:

A complete new scene storage system based on SQLite for much improved and flexible object editing features, supporting an infinite amount of custom value pairs per object. Storing the data in SQLite form makes it also easy to convert it to other formats and process it further with one of the many free tools out there. We will of course release the source to the new scene-loader-class, so you can either integrate it into your project or have it easier to write a converter.
Image
Click on the thumbnail for fullsize view.

Normalmapping and dynamic lighting with 9 textures (kudos to SongofTheWeave's great shaderwork):
Image Image
Image Image
Click on the thumbnails for fullsize view.

Inspired by AJ's awesome "Player"-demo the projective decal has been replaced with a mesh-decal, being more performant and showing the current brush in size and rotation, enabling more accurate artistry. A small shader (my first, yay) takes the black and white brush-image and transforms it into what you can see on the screenshots:
Image Image
Click on the thumbnails for fullsize view.

And here is something that works already in the current version I wanted to bring to attention again, since talking to users pretty much gave me the impression it was a bit underadvertised so far: "Backblending" of the baked-together splatting textures as color-layer on top of the terrain. This is a function that helps reducing disturbing texture tile patterns a great deal as you can see it in the following screenshots. It can be done comfortably by pressing 2 buttons, pressing one to bake the splatt and another one will apply it to the terrains color-layer. The following screenshots demonstrate the difference, with and without it. There has been a little bit of manual corrections around the trees but otherwise what you see is pretty much out of the box:
Image Image
Image Image
Click on the thumbnails for fullsize view.

These are not the only improvements the next version 0.90 will bring but some of the bigger ones, and hopefully humble appetizers. Several other existing functions have been improved and matured, WASD movement is in, as is MouseWheel zoom, a project manager dialogue, a scene-settings dialogue and a new toolbar are about to be finished. Many thanks to everyone helping with it by providing solid and honest critique and plenty of improvment suggestions and ideas :)
Last edited by Nauk on Tue Dec 14, 2010 2:00 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by strikerbcb »

great news Nauk, i think that´s one of the best work here. Continue with that !

And you are using the newest Navi library ? that´s have some gains in speed...

i´m waiting the release!
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Post by tdev »

very fancy editor, congratulations :)

i hope it wont die as so many projects on here ...

also, where is the source code, and what license does it have?

since i would like to code a specific editor for our game:
- spline object editing (like in Trainz)
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Post by jacmoe »

tdev wrote:very fancy editor, congratulations :)

i hope it wont die as so many projects on here ...

also, where is the source code, and what license does it have?

since i would like to code a specific editor for our game:
- spline object editing (like in Trainz)
I don't know, tdev - but you really ought to show a little respect.
And at least read what's in the topic. :?

Nauk has said multiple times that he's not sure if he is willing to release the source. So please respect that.

And rejoice.
Because this editor is getting better all the time! :)

@Nauk:
Woo-Hoo!
This just looks groovie! Kudos to you! :lol:
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Post by tdev »

jacmoe wrote: Nauk has said multiple times that he's not sure if he is willing to release the source. So please respect that.
whoops, i overflew the pages, and it seems i missed that completely :oops:
sorry :(
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Post by jacmoe »

Maybe I was being a bit too harsh.
So don't worry about it.

Much.. :twisted:
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Post by jacmoe »

This would be a cool addition to the Ogre Featured Projects Gallery! :)
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Post by KungFooMasta »

Very nice! How did you go about creating the Mesh Decal? In particular I'm wondering how many vertices the mesh is made of, and how often you map it to the terrain floor.
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Post by Nauk »

@strikerbcb: thank you now that is an awesome compliment :) To answer your question, right now I am using the latest mozilla based Navi from SVN, version 1.7 and it works pretty good, seems like all focus problems are solved and it is very mature. I however have started to port to chrome but there is a lot of work because I used a lot of mozilla-quirky code that won't work in chrome. Right now I am being torn between going to Navi 1.8 completely or stick with 1.7 because I just discovered the pleasures of XUL and skinning the mozilla engine. XUL is the xml based widget language mozilla is using for its own gui and skins, it is considerably much faster than HTML and you can customize it fully with CSS, so more or less native-like css stylable UI. You can find more about it and benchmarks here: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/01/31/xul ... -tabPanel2 and the reference here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Reference. I am playing with the thought of making a complete XUL skin for Artifex.

@tdev: thank you for the nice words :) It won't die I can promiss you that, right now I am working eagerly on pushing towards a finished version 1.0, and there are 2 more developers to help now. About the source code, we discussed the matter back and forth and how to go on with it, because the thing was never planned to be released to the public to begin with. Final right now is that it will stay closed source, and we are heading for 2 commercial versions, one pocket money cheap (around 20$) standard with all features you have right now + extra enabled and one "pro" version supporting the editing of many of the popular ogre addons (PagedGeometry, Hydrax, Caelum, etc) and some more secretive ideas we have in the drawer or partially working already, if we make it that far it will be around 80$ but not more, so all in all very affordable. The betas untill 0.999 will remain free to use eternally. We have been carefully considering all options, but for one thing, I really don't want to refactor the close to 120.000 lines of code (counted without libraries) and keeping up improving it is very time consuming (right now there is a full year dev-time in it) and we are hoping to see a little bit of revenue to buy us free time to do so, at least support the website-hosting. I hope that answers it sufficiently :)

@jacmoe: Haha, thank you very much, makes me happy to see you like it and find it groovy :) Also thanks for the defense and I would be happy about a spot in featured projects, definately, thank you for suggesting it!

@KungFooMasta: Thanks a lot, I am very glad you like it :) The mesh is consisting of 10*10 Vertices (seems sufficient) and those are updated everytime you either move the mouse, change the size or do a terraforming operation, I first tried it with ETMs getHeightAt(x,z) but then I decided for the RayQuery because I think it is more accurate. But as mentioned you can look at AJ's player-demo that shows pretty much how it is done and calculated.
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Post by Nauk »

Nauk wrote:The betas untill 0.999 will remain free.


Small addition to that one, the last beta before 1.0 will be turned into a light version after bugfixing and remain free. :)
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Post by Nauk »

Ok still not done, but almost there, some more screenshots in the meantime showing some of the new dialogues, toolbar, the freshly integrated paged-geometry grass, and some of the demo scenery I am working with:
(Click to see the full screenshot)
Image Image

Image Image

Image Image

Image Image

Image Image

Here is a copy of my TODO-list with the changes that are in and working this far:
================================================
new version 0.90:
***** DONE: meshscaling during placement not working properly
***** DONE: but improve it -- fix mesh moving system Y-axis + detach from ground after the mesh has been placed
***** DONE: edit grass
***** DONE: save camera bindpoint
***** DONE: sidebar reload button for editing fog water grass light
***** DONE: remove lightmap dialogue
***** DONE: edit water
***** DONE: edit ambient light
***** DONE: add ambient light to zonesettings
***** DONE: fix carve / plane tool
***** DONE: hide toolbar when texture studio pops
***** DONE: PG grass
***** DONE: Normalmapping
***** DONE: limit blur mode bug
***** DONE: edit fog
***** DONE: edit light
***** DONE: edit skye
***** DONE: edit terrain settings
***** DONE: WASD movement
***** DONE: toolbar
***** DONE: show hide toolbar
***** DONE: replace ET_clean material lacks texture studio support
***** DONE: resize splatting size in settings file
***** DONE: Improved Mesh Scaling Tool
***** DONE: made bars clickable in sidebar.html
***** DONE: Brush flipping
***** DONE: move to ETM 2.3.1
***** DONE: move to Navi 1.7
***** DONE: hide decal in idle mode
***** DONE: Mousewheel ZOOM
***** DONE: User: btw: i found a bug in artifex... when i save my zone my fog settings are screwed up (in zonesettings.cfg)
***** DONE: SQLite integration
***** DONE: infinite custom object properties
***** DONE: make mesh properties editable
***** DONE: improved brush accuracy
***** DONE: meshdecal resembling the current brush, size and rotation
********************************************

Kudos to JohnJ for the awesome PagedGeometry addon, after toying around a while with it this is definately one of my favorite Ogre-Addons :)

I am hopefully done the next couple of days, now there is only the File / Project-Dialogue, the Toolbar pictos and a handfull of smaller tweaks left to do :)
Last edited by Nauk on Tue Dec 14, 2010 2:01 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by jacmoe »

I am impressed. :)
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Post by kutraj »

Great work Nauk!

The grass adds a special touch to those screenies :)

Can't wait to get my hands on this!
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Post by Wretched_Wyx »

Boy Nauk, that's very impressive work. I'll definitely end up using this in my engine, if we don't decide to make our tools.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [v0.90 PG-grass++ prev. Pg.4]

Post by Nauk »

Thanks guys, getting so nice feedback is definately helping to keep going and very motivating :) I couldn't resist to squeeze in another feature before release, WYSIWYG/realtime grass painting is up and running, pressure and brush sensitive, such a breeze and so inspiring to work with PagedGeometry, everything you could wish for is there and easy to use.
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [v0.90 PG-grass++ prev. Pg.4]

Post by Chris84 »

Nice, this terrain editor is great. Can't wait for the next release :D
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [v0.90 PG-grass++ prev. Pg.4]

Post by Nauk »

Thank you Chris84 :) The new version is well on its way, I took myself the liberty of a few days XMas holidays without computer, artifex and code and am well rested and with a fresh mind back to working on it now, the projectmanager is halfway in and already loading, so if no unexpected bug shows up, it will be there sooner as you can say "yay" :)
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Re: ArtifexTerra - Terrain editor [v0.90 PG-grass++ prev. Pg.4]

Post by MCin22 »

Your work is awesome :) . I have a few questions. Does ArtifexTerra support dynamic lightning for grass and other plants (objects) or it will be in the future? I'm not sure but PagedGeometry doesn't support this. I'm also wondering how the grass will be looking with Caelum :wink: .

I must say, I'm really waiting for version 0.90 :D.
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