WarmTart

10 things I have aded to the Terrain demo

here is a list of 10 things I have added to the Terrain demo:-

1: Quadtree rendering - Helps immensely with speed of rendering and also with planning the LOD.

2: Frustum culling integrated into the QuadTree - Further increase in frameRates.

3: Removed GLSL - I have removed the use of GLSL and switched to standard OpenGL Multi-Texturing to help with inconsistencies across different Graphics Cards ( I was very annoyed with trying to get things working on ATI-Nvidia-Intel all at the same time.

4: Animated water mesh - This gives a great effect, and has surprisingly little effect on framerates.

5: Skydome - Where would we be without a nice sky to look at.

6: Randomly generated clouds - Using Fractal Brownian Motion, sounds much more impressive than it actually is, but gives us a nice set of random clouds to populate our skydome.

7: Detail map - Well, the standard multi-texturing technique wasn`t quite enough , so we now LERP between textures for different height ranges and then stick a layer of seemingly random splodges over the top ..... makes it look much nicer.

8: Ability to load and save Terrain data

9: three different methods of generating random Terrains as well as the ability to load in a greyscale TGA image as a heightmap

10: Currently, all other entities removed from the demo , it`s just a Terrain at the moment ..... Hmmmm shall I change the game dynamics? or not even bother, and leave it as a pure Terrain demo?

Terrain Demo update

The new Terrain demo is almost ready to roll out. I have had a lot of fun coding it over the last few weeks, and as of now, the only thing missing from the list of proposed new improvements is the lighting. see future posts very soon for screenshots, and take a peek at how it`s looking right now from the link on the left.

Working on vast improvements to the terrain demo

Over the last few days/weeks, I have been working on some major improvements on the terrain demo. I am expecting to very shortly add a Quadtree terrain with some cool added features like erosion , propogation? ( adding more detail to rougher terrain areas). lovely animaterd water ( ripples and waves), mist ( a nice mist hanging over the water in certain areas,and more.....

I have been able to do these things for 2 reasons. Firstly because I bought a new book called "Focus on: 3D terrain programming".. and secondly due to the help of the genius Matthias Mann ( www.MatthiasMann.de .

The book explains a lot of theory behind the things I have been trying to do, and although it claims to give you all the code you need to get it all working, there`s a major problem from my point of view..... IT`S ALL IN C++.

Hence the help of Matthias, as there are quite a few things which C++ does which I completely do not ( or hopefully, did not) understand.

Once these things are added to my demo, I will upload a mass of screenshots and details .... also code if I am allowed :)

still working

I am still working on it :)

Have changed the whole rendering process of the demo and now find that although it looks great and framerates are great, the scale of things is too small..... so whats the way forward?

well, I decided to add a SCALE variable to everything and its going ok except theres a small problem with interpolating heights which I am still looking into..

How I have things now, my 256*256 map looks nice and hilly and smooth, but also looks massive... I LIKE IT!!

always a bugger, trying to decide if I should get the current part perfect or move onto the next thing and come back to it.....current thinking is "Dont move forward til its perfect"

Latest

Well, the latest update fixes all the annoying 3rd person camera glitches and adds back in the player and the enemies. It generally works well, but I am having problems with Frustum and LOD as can be seen.....

kps please contact me

kps. I got a mail from you but not sure what is going on. please contact me again.

thanks

what I`m working on at the moment

a couple of pics

added a couple of pics of my terrain demo

Terrain demo

please try out the Terrain Demo If people like it, I will continue to develop it and make it into a fully playable game... possibly with multi-player

you can play here . . or view the details here

New Game demo

I`ve made a game/demo using Slick2D and I quite like it. Please take a look and tell me what you think. Play as Applet here or download the webstart here

sometimes the slick library is updated and the applet stops working. if so try the webstart, it should always work