Outdoor level experiment

[bernie]

A few pics showing the outdoor level I am experimenting with. So far it is running at 75 fps on Laptop running vista ultimate 4gb ram.
views from a hilltop near the centre of the island. The terrain (2000*2000 texels) was made using L3dt to make the textures and heightmap then built in T2 and split into 16 parts. The parts were reassembled in RF as static meshes. The player is universal woman (credit Animatrix) and is reduced to 1/10th its normal size. The first 4 views are taken from a hilltop in the middle if the island and the last is looking south from the north beach.

north.jpg

(114.01 KiB) Downloaded 75 times

west.jpg

(132.28 KiB) Downloaded 50 times

South.jpg

(124.86 KiB) Downloaded 34 times

East.jpg

(117.31 KiB) Downloaded 30 times

north_beach.jpg

(95.31 KiB) Downloaded 41 times

[creekmonkey]

Looks very good bernie!
I have also been experimenting with l3dt and t2 to make outdoor terrain. The problems I have encountered is when I scale the player down more than 50% the player actions are distorted. Virgil continously jerks and twitches, and at times appears in slow motion. Also depending on which direction the player faces the frame rate will drop dramatically.

[bernie]

Thats strange I don't seem to be getting those problems. The biggest problem I get is that the Textures on the terrain get worse the smaller you make the player. But the experiment goes on. I am creating the insides of the huts and things under the terrain (outside the skybox) as seperate boxes and using teleporters to get the player in and out of them instead of doors. That way all the rooms are sealed and nothing outside them is rendered so the framerate is kept up & getting more and more actors into the level. The skybox is 4000*4000*700 so that leaves an area 4000*4000*3300 left to play in below the skybox. Also I noticed that the point 0,0,0 in the editor has to be kept ouside the skybox otherwise strange things happen, like the whole level floods if a water plane cuts the point 0 on any axis. That might be the problem you are having with the speed and animations. Try offsetting the level away from the centre point and see if that cures it.

[metal_head]

Wow, pretty nice work!

[paradoxnj]

This is where DX9 will help out. I could probably update the OpenGL driver to render this efficiently but it would be doubling QoD's work on the DX9 driver.

Bernie, does L3DT export to heightmap? If so, can you please export to heightmap so I can test this in RF2?

[edit] I like the skybox. [/edit]

[bernie]

@paradoxnj yes L3dt does export heightmap. L3dt is used for Ogre. Uploaded to my filefront. The file is height1024_90c.bmp.

EDIT: file uploaded

[paradoxnj]

Shows you how much I know about modelling and world building...Thanks!!

[creekmonkey]

Well I tried moving everything in the level to make sure nothing was orinated to 0,0,0 (or zero on any axis) and still got the jerking and twiching if my player was scaled below 0.5. Also it doesnt appear there is anyway to change the walk and run spped of the player to match the scaled down version

[Jay]

The biggest problem I get is that the Textures on the terrain get worse the smaller you make the player.

You could try to use the TileTextureMapper in Milkshape (Planar Texture Mapping).

Still, it would be VERY nice to have Detail Mapping / Multi Texturing for this. You could have a big texture for the whole terrain that contains a lightmap (shadows on the terrain) and the general colour of the terrain, and small textures that give the details.

[bernie]

@ Jay
The problem with the texture isn't mapping, it's resolution.

[Jay]

I think you misunderstood what i meant, or vice versa.
Actually the tile texture mapper is a workaround for the resolution, because if you're using one big texture (2048x2048) then it gets worse the smaller the player is. But if you use many small textures (256x256, 512x512) and tile-texture-map them, then you can alter the 'resolution' to your needs (via altering the number of tiles you use). I think there is a limit of about 100 tiles per side.

Sadly you can't have texture-baked shadows on the terrain this way.

Detail mapping would solve this problem because with detail mapping you have two textures which are sized differently. The first would be the big texture containing the lightmap, the second would be the small textures containing the surface of the terrain.