ROAM Planet rendering

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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Sovaka
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Nesetalis wrote:darn, was hoping for something along the lines of BSD or Zlib.
Don't be too disheartened. As I said, we haven't made up our mind yet :)
We will ensure that it will be available to everyone one way or another.
And we will keep everyone updated on the going ons.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Nesetalis »

for us, it would be the kinda thing we rip apart, remaster, and then implement. We of course are not the average users, we were planning on building our own but when I saw how far you guys were and how well it was going, well... would shave a lot of effort off :p
would feel silly for all these different planet rendering engines being built at the same time.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by jacmoe »

Nesetalis wrote:for us, it would be the kinda thing we rip apart, remaster, and then implement. We of course are not the average users, we were planning on building our own but when I saw how far you guys were and how well it was going, well... would shave a lot of effort off :p
would feel silly for all these different planet rendering engines being built at the same time.
Wow.
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Sovaka
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Nesetalis wrote:for us, it would be the kinda thing we rip apart, remaster, and then implement. We of course are not the average users, we were planning on building our own but when I saw how far you guys were and how well it was going, well... would shave a lot of effort off :p
Where is the fun in that??? :P

And I am not sure what you would rip out... I mean if there are only one or two things that you actually want from the engine then it would be far easier for you to program exactly what you're after?
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Praetor »

Raknet style licensing? You could take a look at how he does his licensing model. It is very friendly and flexible. I have no idea how successful it is. But from my side (the consumer/client side) it seems pretty good.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Nesetalis »

its not necessarily that its only one or two things we want.. but how we want to do things with it. :p

nothing really to say about it, as nothing in regard to planets is coded. We are still waiting after all to see where this goes.

If you want to get a better idea you can peek at our wiki where we just dump ideas and notes, but I doubt you care about that XD
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Praetor wrote:Raknet style licensing? You could take a look at how he does his licensing model. It is very friendly and flexible. I have no idea how successful it is. But from my side (the consumer/client side) it seems pretty good.
RakNet licencing is very nice I must admit, and definitely something to compare against if we go a licence structure.
However, considering that it is just a network library for your product and the Single SKU licence is only $5,000... It's not in the same league as a complete game engine.
I do like the indie consideration in there, being indie ourselves, it helps ;)

Just as point of interest, it is the RakNet library that we are using for networking :)
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

Hey guys,

Just wanted to post a quick congrats, had a look at the demo and it's pretty impressive. I was wondering about how you're handling geomorphing though, when I fly around there's a lot of 'popping'. Is this something that's still being worked on? Anyways, I get between 60 - 80 frames and my machine stats are as follows:

Windows edition : Vista Home Premium with service pack 2
Manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard
Model : Compaq Presario CQ60 Notebook PC
Rating : 3.3 (windows experience index)
Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P7350 @ 2.00GHz
Memory (RAM) : 2.00 GB
System Type : 32-bit operating system
Video Card : GeForce 9200M GE
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Hello ultramedia,

The popping on the terrain has nearly been taken care of. The small amount of popping that is left, shouldn't be that noticeable.
It morphs more gradually now instead of immediately jumping to the higher res.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

Awesome :)

Is there a demo of this available to try yet?
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Not yet, we are working hard on getting the new demo up and running.
If you have over to our site (in my sig), you will see a progress meter at the top of the page.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Lord LoriK »

Hmm... just checked the meter. 53% sounds like "it'll be a long time before you see something"... Oh, well, let's keep waiting, then.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Lord LoriK wrote:Hmm... just checked the meter. 53% sounds like "it'll be a long time before you see something"... Oh, well, let's keep waiting, then.
Hehe not really, we put together a list of what we would like to see released in the new demo.
We mark those areas as % complete to where we think they are.
This will fluctuate depending on when we last updated the numbers or if we decide not to have a certain feature in it before the next demo.

My estimation is about 2 weeks and it should be there.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Lord LoriK »

Great news, then! :D

Is the demo just that, or we get something to tinker with in the same package?
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Lord LoriK
Is the demo just that, or we get something to tinker with in the same package?
With any luck, I hope to have an interface in this demo so you can edit it a little, and maybe play around with generating your own planets.
Gotta see how I go in the next couple of weeks, but should be nice enough though.
The eye candy side of things will be a little nicer this time.

regards

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by paul kennedy »

Hi
I read this long thread with some interest. i have a good number of queries, such as:
will your engine support DTM's being modified by another process (another app writing terrain files for your to render)
any idea how well it all scales? I have some huge DTM's to render. billions of nodes in the dtm.
does your engine sit alongside ogre, so we can still use ogre for things other than terrains?
are you using ogre in double precision numbers? Floats are troublesome when working with planet sized numbers
Are you using ECEF's for coordinates?
The list goes on.
I would ask when, but I am sure you are tired of that one.
I tried to find some contact details so I could call you to discuss, but no luck. I am based in Perth.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Paul,

I'm assuming that DTM's are Dynamic Terrain Managers, and yes, my engine will render other data, as long as it is handled by a class that will import it and send it to the terrain handler in the right format. As for running along side Ogre, that also is a yes, it actually doesn't need Ogre to build the data, it's only in the main render thread code, that the engine is tied to Ogre, for stuff like entities and stuff like that, as for the actual terrain data, it is pretty much independent.

I am using Ogre in Double Precision mode, that's the only way I could get the camera to move smoothly while on the ground, and stop the trees and bushes and dwellings from shaking around while the camera is in motion.

ECEF's for coordinates ..... What the hell does that stand for ?

The engines coming along OK, I haven't had that much time to spend on it lately, Life gets in the way sometimes.
But I've been really messing around with shaders more than anything, getting my head around the concepts, so I can do this thing real justice.
Nothing worse than having something really nice running, and the presentation looks crap, so I'm trying to make it look NextGen in nature

regards

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by paul kennedy »

Hi Alex
sorry for the abbreviations. I live in this stuff and forget it is all geek speak.
DTM = Digital Terrain Model, sometimes called a Digital Elevation Model in the USA. This is usually a rectangular grid with elevations at the grid nodes.
ECEF = Earth Centred Earth Fixed. this is a well used coordinate reference system for representing a 3D latitude, longitude and elevation in a simple X,Y,Z where the origin is at the centre of the earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodetic_s ... oordinates. this coordinate reference system is used by planet apps such as google earth, NASA worldwind etc. it is easy to transform back and forth from a lat/long to an ecef. ECEF's are good as the plot with ease.
For us, a terrain is a real terrain of observations of the earths surface. we survey the earth and oceans, and view it in 3D space. We are looking at OGRE to replace our existing OpenGL codebase. we envisage generating the mesh data for the earth surface (based on real time surveys) and supply it to your 'terrain handler'. does that sound correct?

It is good that you are using double precision numbers. we tried using floats, but ECEF's (in metres) from the centre of the earth are problematic. you get truncation of the big numbers, so jitter in the rendering.

We are developing in c# so are helping out with the mogre wrapper. it is going quite well.
I am interested in how well your roam engine behaves. we have studied this in the past, but the popping and tearing at the sides was always a problem. It would be great if you have this sorted.

We are old hands at terrains, but new to ogre. however we are beavering away here in Perth, and will be in a position in the near future where we will nned to decide which way to go to get massive terrains into our scene. By massive I mean billions of elevation observations. do you believe your system can be of use? if it is close, i am interested, but if you are a way's off, we will investigate sinbad's implementation of terrains, and figure out how to use them with ecef's. failing that, we will probably implement the hoppe lod engine we are already familiar with. having said that, reinventing wheels is not something i am fond of, so if you are close to release into the wild, i would like to take a look before deciding.

regards
pk
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Paul,

That project you are working on sounds very interesting, Sort of a Google Earth type scenario, but for scientific purposes I would imagine, I would love to help with that in some way maybe ....

I am using the ECEF coordinate system, sort of, by the way, thank's for the link, I didn't know about ECF as such but as it happens, I use ECEF to locate the actual heights for the vertices but then when Uploading to the GPU I offset them to the center of the page that this height belongs too, so that when I get really close to the terrains' surface it reduces the rounding error of the floating point numbers because I'm dealing with smaller offsets and GPUs only accept floats not doubles I think, there fore alleviating the small shift gitters you see on so many full sized planet apps, this way I can actually go to within 1 mm of the surface and not experience any gittering. The whole planets' coordinate system works off of a unit sphere, the six sides dictate the alignments, but makes it easy to then break up the unit sphere into pages per side, dynamically paged or not, it's up to you. It took a long time to get the ROAM to work with dynamic paging, but with that it makes it more friendly to more conventional methods of shadow mapping and texture painting and the like.

The popping side of things is just a short coming of dynamic terrain generation, but I seem to have it pretty much under control, you can still see it from high up and doing a rapid approach, but if you come down at a realistic pace, it's pretty much just a smooth shift, and on the ground it is pretty much gone, it is still there, but hardly noticeable, if you move around at say 100-200 kmph you won't see any vertex morphing, but if you travel really fast, the algorithm just can't keep up unless you dynamically reduce the detail level depending on velocity, OH, and you might see a large peak in the distance suddenly appear or disappear depending on the way you are traveling (away from or moving closer too). I'm working on that too.

As for the edge ripping, it is completely solved now, I get no ripping as you call it. I have noticed though that sometimes when standing inside a dwelling and looking out through a window which is close to the camera (like putting your nose up against the glass) that in the distance I might see a skirt show through on a mountain side, obviously a depth precision problem, and if you turn to one side a little the skirt slots back in to its correct position in the depth buffer, I have herd of someone using a logarithmic depth buffer (probably just a formula for calculating the near and far clipping planes a bit more accurately, don't know, but I have to look into that ).

I do still have a few issues to solve with this engine, and I don't have any dynamic loading of data yet, which is something you are certainly going to require by the sounds of it, I do have entity paging in there, for foliage and dwellings and stuff like that, on a per page basis, but nothing fancy yet (another thing I'm working on).

It would be nice to here about this project a little more (get an understanding of what you are trying to achieve) because I would love to help.

regards

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by paul kennedy »

Hi
our OGRE project is part of a much larger development. We have a home-grown DirectX based scene graph which works very nicely, but to complete it, we would need to implement a lot of what exists in OGRE, so we made the decision to investigate OGRE. Our risk analysis went well, and here we are. We intend to commit back into the community rather than firewall our efforts off. It is a give and take thing.

Using ECEF's does make life easier. To convert between Lat/Lon and ecef is efficient. It is not a perfect visual means to represent the earth, as the earth is not really round, but it is fast and the underlying numbers are correct. at the planetary scale, the ellipsoidal nature of the earth is imperceptible. Overcoming the double/float truncation with a localised offset is exactly how we implemented it in OpenGL a few years back.

Our app is used for visualisation of spatial data in both 'real-time' and 'processing' mode. the real time really means real time. We collect data from various sensors, log, QC and display it. We have a lot of this already in place, but intend to replace the 3D display bit with OGRE. It is a bit like a Google earth environment, but tailored to meet our requirements.

From reading the thread, it sounds like you are working on lots of stuff at the same time. We would need the dynamic loading of data for sure. Our acquisition systems would deal with the raw data, and convert it into something OGRE can easily digest in real time. LOD is important here. Perhaps we can assist you with the dynamic loading of data into your engine?

Maybe we could collaborate to get your engine fully operational? Feel free to give me a call over the long weekend.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by AWM Mars »

Oh Oh.... I went to the website to check on progress.... http://www.titaniumarts.com.au/cgi-sys/ ... edpage.cgi

I hope this is simply a technical hitch....
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day AWM Mars,
AWM Mars wrote:Oh Oh.... I went to the website to check on progress.... http://www.titaniumarts.com.au/cgi-sys/ ... edpage.cgi

I hope this is simply a technical hitch....
You are exactly right, it is a stupid technical hitch to do with the service provider, don't worry, this thing is going strong.

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

AWM Mars wrote:Oh Oh.... I went to the website to check on progress.... http://www.titaniumarts.com.au/cgi-sys/ ... edpage.cgi

I hope this is simply a technical hitch....
Very much so... So much trouble yet I have been assured that it will be up and running within an hour of this post.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Lord LoriK »

It's still down. :(
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Lord LoriK wrote:It's still down. :(
Yeah the hosting provider has received a not so nice email.