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Submitted by , posted on 09 February 2001
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Image Description, by
Myself and Alex C. have this little thing going about landscapes and ROAM
and what have you. So I thought I'd submit an early test shot of a
landscape system I am playing with as part of my landscape adventures :)
My contention was, that texture and lighting are ALL thats important to a
nice landscape. Not fancy shmancy level of detail ROAM implementations or
other insanity.
So. Here is a test image I took.
A brief description of whats going on:
1) The texture is generated from a base set of textures (hand drawn by me
:)), it uses a simple alpha blend with noise added, and is about right
apart from its pretty uncontrollable and needs some changes based on slope
angle.
2) There is a seperate "light" map, which is basically a colour per vertex
byte image produced from the heightmap.
3) The heightmap is either taken from an image or is generated with a FBM
or other fractal algorithm (its pretty unimportant).
4) I added a detail texture, which is applied using multitexturing via the
second tmu.
The heightmap is broken into "patches", and each patch is placed into a
quadtree, the quadtree nodes (and contained patches) are coarsly (sp?)
culled against the view frustrum (nothing complex there).
Without the incredibly shoddy LOD system I am putting in place, I can get
between 30 and 70+ fps at full detail (dependant on how your view frustum
falls against the quadtree). WITH the isLs I should be able to double that
(at least). Patches are rendered as quad strips, using nothing fancy at all.
I am still unsure wether to call this landscape system "BRUTAL" (because
its as brute force as you can get) or YALE (yet another landscape engine).
:)) Suggestions on a postcard please!
Phil.
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