ROAM Planet rendering

[Sovaka]

Well the fog is relatively easy compared to waterfalls and separated higher altitude rivers/water bodies.

[DavlexDesign]

G'day Steven and Sovaka,

Thank's for the input, I haven't tried localized fog yet, I'll give it a go later though.
With regards to rivers and raised level bodies of water, I think I have that covered already, the terrain engine at the moment stores info on topology in its structure already which I can use to accomplish that feature (just got to implement it) and rivers are there as well, with regards to waterfalls, that will entail me incorperating a particle emitter for the river going to steep, and depending on the slope, make it look like rapids or a full blown waterfall.(these features are something that I have been thinking about while creating this terrain engine, and implemented features to accomplish this. That's why the frame rate is down a little from the first you tube video you saw on page 1 of this forum, the mesh is producing allot more than meets the eye, I just have to implement them).

At the moment I'm modifying PagedGeometry to what I need, I have to do a fair bit to it, to allow such a huge varying up vector paging system.

I'll look into those other things after this ....

Keep the Ideas coming, I love it. (Now, how the hell do you pull off localized fog ? )

regards

Alex

[Sovaka]

There was a thread here on a soft particle system that was awesome. Was open source too if I remember correctly. It basically incorporated some billboards with alpha maps etc to create the illusion of soft particles. Then tied in to a particle emitter.

Could do the same thing and then have a procedurally generated weather like map that will dictate pressure variables and where there is the high or low pressure, the engine spawns these fog emitters?

[DavlexDesign]

G'day Sovaka,

Yeah, I was looking at it a while back, could be good for a number of things, like volcano plumes and even a dynamic fog layer (good thinking mate!!!), forgot about that one, (thinking on the fly here), I could use it to a degree, for the localized fog as well I suppose, as long as the performance isn't hit too hard, if I can keep this thing running above 180 to 250 fps for whole of the environment, I'll be happy. That way I can still get avatars and such humming along nicely when it comes to game play. Thank's for the tip !!!! .

regards

Alex

[Sovaka]

No probs
Also look at it with scale as well... If you scale up the size of the particle, you can get more area covered without a particle increase and thus should keep down the FPS hit. Considering fog actually doesn't need a texture, you should be able to get away with rather large billboard plumes that look convincing

[steven]

a dynamic fog layer

Mh... could those "atmospheric layers" be used to localise rain, snow and fog ?
So a plane above the clouds would see from a distance a "rain/snow/fog billboard" and as it approach/go below the cloud the rain/snow particle emitter would be implemented. Perhaps a callback could be used when a certain lod is reached.

[DavlexDesign]

G'day guys,

Both those ideas are great, I will look into them soon, firstly though, I've go to get the flora working at a nice pace, with the detail I require. After that I'll get into the clouds and water, then the other stuff.
Please keep the ideas coming, that way as I'm coding, I can sort of make allowances for some of these things as I go. I want to make this thing useful to everybody when the time comes, so you can just plug in things to make it nicer.

regards

Alex

[xadhoom]

I just want to add that usually adding local fog introduces some kind of compositor pass because you need to access the depthbuffer when drawing a fog geometry with a special shader. Especially transparent surfaces/materials could leed to problems then because they usually don´t write depth values but might be considered for consistent fog...
I think Hydrax solves this by adding an additional depth technique to every material when rendering depth values only in another pass for underwater fog.

xad

[DavlexDesign]

Especially transparent surfaces/materials could leed to problems then because they usually don´t write depth values but might be considered for consistent fog...

I see what you mean, I'll have to think about that one in relation to how I render my stuff, but that will be a problem I'll look into later on down the track, I'm not there yet.

Alex

[petrocket]

Wow, this stuff all looks so good! Great job!

I've been workin on the same sort of thing for a while now and am about to convert it to a plugin. Sounds like we have the same goal in mind though! The only huge difference is that I'm not using ROAM, I'm using chunked LOD basically and enforce a rule in the quad tree that each tile be no more than one detail level different than the tiles around it (no skirts)

My main problem has been generating/loading the terrain height maps, normals/tangents and textures without lag spikes. And I'm not sure how you incorporate localized height map customizations.

Does the frame rate vary much when running at 800x600 vs 1280x1024? Also, what kind of graphics hardware are you running on with your home machine? I've been using an Nvidia 8600 GT mobile card and I'm not sure whether to consider that a medium level graphics card or not.

[DavlexDesign]

G'day petrocket,

My hardware is an Nvidia 9800GT, (I like it). I would class the 8600 a medium card I suppose and the framerate doesn't change between 800x600 and 1280x1024 on mine, it hums allong nicely at both.

With regards to your chunk lod system, I moved away from that, basically because I am trying to get this thing running completely generated on the CPU and in RAM, that way relieving me of the need to store huge amounts of data (terrain height maps and normal maps etc) just for one planet. At the moment my engine is using around 200mb ram to run (including Ogre Dlls and all graphics and geometry), and I can go from space to anywhere on the planets surface without any noticeable drop in frame rate.

I want to incorporate Sinbads' new terrain engine as a small area section (like for towns and cities) that will blend into my terrain mesh, mainly due to the fact that allot of people are working on terrain editors for it, and my terrain engine will just merge its mesh into those areas seamlessly. That way I will only need to store a very small amount of data just for key areas of a planet, and leave the rest (fully explorable) to be generated on the CPU.

regards

Alex

[ImpScary]

G'day petrocket,

I want to incorporate Sinbads' new terrain engine as a small area section (like for towns and cities) that will blend into my terrain mesh, mainly due to the fact that allot of people are working on terrain editors for it, and my terrain engine will just merge its mesh into those areas seamlessly. That way I will only need to store a very small amount of data just for key areas of a planet, and leave the rest (fully explorable) to be generated on the CPU.

Sounds great, I am really looking forward to the release of your planet engine, would definately use it in my project!

[DavlexDesign]

G'day guys,

Here we go, This is a demo of this thing for you to play with, It's not very fancy,
but at least you will get an idea of how this thing is going.

Destination.jpg

The zip contains instructions on the controls.
just unzip to any place (keep directory structure intact)
run Demo_Planet.exe
and see how it goes.

This download has been updated so that if you hold LEFT SHIFT key down, you will get a speed boost

Executable Demo:
http://www.titaniumarts.com.au/index.ph ... &Itemid=29 "PlanetDemo.zip " [14,118 kb].

Have fun

Alex

[Sovaka]

The red circle in the image shows the location of the Hut with some trees

Press and hold 'L' for a second or two to turn the sun around to give you some better light.

HUGE Terrain, love it all. Excellent work Alex

[DavlexDesign]

G'day guys,

before you start criticizing me about this program, I thought I might clear a few things up for you.

1. This engine isn't batching any geometry, I haven't implemented Paged geometry yet. So those trees are complete 3D objects, not cloned or instanced or anything special like that, Ogre is doing the culling.
2. The terrain is now using the Libnoise library http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/(great stuff this one), I have made a couple of modifications, but not to the library itself, I do it outside the library, to allow me to get more speed out of it.
3. The terrain engine itself doesn't consolidate its pages/chunks into one batch yet, I'm getting that perfected before I let it out, because of the morphing, I'm trying to optimize this, so as not to hit the video card so hard.
4. Amendments to the controls .... (left some out I think)
Keyboard: Page UP and Page Down = Move in Up/Down relative to camera facing direction.
I,K,J,L = Rotates Planet on its axis causing the sun light to go Up,Down,Left and Right (camera is a child of the planet, so it stays relative to the planet).

I think thats it.

hope you like it so far

regards

Alex

[Lax]

Wow!! Thats incredible. The planet is soo huge, that I can't find the trees and the hut, you described in your readme file . Great work!!

[leonardoaraujo.santos]

Can't wait to see the code and start merging with my space games

Congratulations is very nice man!

[Lord LoriK]

Hi DavlexDesign,

I really like your project very much. I've been following it for a long time and I really get excited when you add features. Congratulations!

Regarding your last comments I wanted to mention that you could try http://sourceforge.net/projects/noisepp/ as an alternative for libnoise, because it has a BSD-like license and it's faster than libnoise, which probably means higher FPS and/or less hiccups when generating the terrain. The project seems to be dead, but it looks usable as-is.

Hope to see a source release soon. Good work!

[James Proctor]

Is any one else getting the error that its side by side configuration is incorrect? Nice work though! Based on what I have read this looks very promising! Wish I could try it out though!

[Lord LoriK]

I was getting errors too, but here's the answer:

http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 5&start=25

If you want it short and simple, just download and install this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogre/fi ... i/download. sinbad uploaded it to fix this same issue.

Hope it helps!

[DavlexDesign]

G'day guy's,

I don't get it! whats that error caused by ? Am I doing something wrong at my end(at compile time) ?

This demo version is compiled against Ogre 6.1, not the latest.

Thanks for the feedback anyway, much appreciated.

regards

Alex

[Sovaka]

Nothing your doing wrong mate,
They just need to install a VC redistribute required to run Ogre properly.

May need to take note of that for an includes...

[DavlexDesign]

May need to take note of that for an includes...

I'll look into that, thank's mate

Alex

[Kay Trance]

Hello everybody!

I am watching this thread for quite a long time, and it's pleasure to me that this topic lives.

Recently I have started to implement LOD by myself, but using jME engine (I realy need it to be crossplatform) and I have found quite a good reference here, so this may be helpful. And another quite a treasure resource is here.

Hope this will help everyone who is interested in understanding all the thing

[Lord LoriK]

Hello, DavlexDesign!

I keep following this thread and the lack of new posts makes me wonder what's happening behind the curtains... Are you still working on it? Can we get some news about this?

Hope to hear from you soon!