posted 11-28- 07:03 AM               

I've been doing some tests with regards to tile grid sizes and the biggest that can seem to get SDOE to load (It might have loaded eventually but I gave up waiting after 10 mins) was 70 tiles by 70 tiles. This is irrespective of the km x km.

I'm not sure if the problem is to do with the model count or the polygon count (which is only 4900 so I wouldn't think so) but I will be looking into this later.

Currently the plan is:

1. Find the (practical) limits for SDOE terrain. Practial meaning it loads without having to start the game before you go to work with a view to play it that night!

2. Build the largest terrain possible using randomly selected, location specific, ground textures. This means that there would be a few classes of texture, i.e. land mets sea in certain ways, fields, cities, etc. and each class would have a few different textures built. When the terrain generator builds the terrain, it would assign a random texture to the tile from the class that is appropriatte for the "type" of tile created.

3. Add a few terrain features by hand, hopefully with some help. This might include the white cliffs of dover, some more hilly areas, some cities etc etc.

In the meantime here is a very unexciting shot of the 109 over some very repetitive EAW terrain.

posted 11-28- 08:50 AM               

I am start thinking about No man's land !
Great work.

posted 11-28- 09:39 AM               

k 3 questions

we are going to be able to get it alot less repetive then that right?

is that ground going to be really pixalated near the ground? thats one of the things i REALLY like about sdoe ground

how many tiles is a normal SDOE terrain?

i'm sure you will get lots of help when your ready

posted 11-28- 10:10 AM               

Got DEM data, satellite pictures... You see, I am extremely interested in your progress.

posted 11-28- 05:50 PM               

1. I'm only testing tile sizes for the moment, so I only created one texture. You could have every tile a different texture if you wanted, so long as your machine could handle them. For a large terrain with a large amount of tiles that would be an extremly large "super" bitmap to manipulate. I would think you would need a machine with a impressive amount of memory to edit it, and a lot of time to actually edit the terrain.

2. The pixelation is dependant on the resolution of the textures, in relation to the amoutn of ground they have to cover. These EAW ones look pixelated anyway becuase they where originally 256 colour and have a bit of dithering going on.

Given that I may have already found a model limit it might mean that I might have to increase the area represented by each model to get the SQ KM's, and have sub tiles that are just LOD polygons. For this, the standard superTexture concept, which basically saves having 4000 texture files defined in the SM file, would mean that the super texture would be streached across the greater area and would get pixelated. To fix it you would have lots of normal textures mapped one per sub-tile. The problem with this is that this could mean having a rather large number of textures defined in the SM file, which would certainly increase load times and may have other undesirable effects. For example if you wanted a 200 x 200 km terrain with unique tiles you could be looking at 40,000 textures!

3. I believe that the normal terrain has about 28x28 tiles, each about 2 miles aquare, which is 56x56mi, or about 90x90km. As the current limit I have found is 70x70 tiles this would mean 140x140mi or 225x225kms would be possible at the same texture resolution as current. Actually I think that this 70x70 limit I have struck might be able to be overcome quite easily

Patchy,

posted 11-28- 06:24 PM               

This is a close-up on the coast of Normandy, it includes Pointe du Hoc and Vierville-sur-Mer (Omaha beach). There are textures like this for whole Europe, but this may not be detailed enough, and is from a commercial product
The DEM is the one you posted about on the other thread.

Cheers,

posted 11-29- 02:26 AM               

Say you made a map 4x's the size of the current SDOE map, could not create 4 "supertifs" using the current size, then dice them to thier respective locations? This whould make it possible to then create "hand" painted terrains with the current limitations of most desktop PC's. Namely mine

As for the random texture placement how is the seaming? Hard to tell from your screenshot. How big would say the town and airfields be in respect to a larger map? If they are big enough then you could hand paint those tiles to spice things up a bit.

Great work, looks as though you are making great progress. Thanks for sharing

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Zoycite {GS}
GUNSLINGERS

visit The War Paint Factory

posted 11-29- 05:45 AM               

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Cheers
Kat out

posted 11-29- 07:00 AM               

The only model limitation that I'm aware of is that you can only have 300 terrain tiles (objects of 'obProto CTerrain' type) visible at any given time. If you have more than that visible, you frame rate will descend into hell.

Actually, that's the 'current' limitation (1.5.1), the 1.5 limitation may have been around 150. I'll check when I get into work.