New Terrain Engine

Over the past week I've been working on another bit of terrain in XNA. This time it's quadtree'd which basically allows me to render vast amounts of terrain with minimum computing power. It also has various different levels of detail per node which allows me to render detailed land up close and only several polys per node far away. I've been receiving good results so far, averaging about 800fps with 1 million vertices. As soon as I add multiple terrain layers (I have sand, grass, snow and rock) it takes a hit though, as well as trees. Anyway, here are some shots from the current version. There are unfortunately some seams between different terrain patches as the LOD changes.

Comments, as always, very welcomed.

Looking pretty sweet, dude. The 'shiny' snow looks a bit fake though mate. Looks like the mountains are glazed in syrup with that lighting/mapping, rather than covered in snow. The actual terrain looks nice, though

Pfft without the shinyness it ain't next gen. Since I removed bloom we have to have some shiny stuff.

Nice! How's it done? Do you get regular building blocks or is it built up from scratch?

How\'s what done? XNA? If so you basically have an engine underneath everything which makes life a lot easier than pure DirectX, but you still basically have to do everything yourself, you just have facilities for things like Vectors and Matrices which are otherwise time consuming. I\'m mainly interested in the shader side of things ^^

( Edited 02.04.2008 23:55 by knighty )

Is it actually eight hundred FPS, or is that a typo and it's meant to be eighty?

800. It's not that impressive really considering I'm using an 8800GT lol.

My next major job is getting cell based terrain going. At the moment 1 million vertices + 200bytes per vertex is using a LOT of RAM. So to extend it I need to load in blocks on the fly. Fuck knows how I'm gonna store the height data though. Probably an epically huge height map.

Explain what 'cell based terrain' is, plz.

As in the terrain is represented as cells which can be loaded/unloaded separately.

So that the entire map needn't be in RAM all at once.

Well a 1024 x 1024 block would be reasonable per cell (possibly 512 x 512) so basically I\'d have all that in RAM, then the surrounding cells would maybe only have a \"resolution\" of 128 x 128, and lower as it gets further away.

That 1024 x 1024 block has, itself, 32 x 32 blocks inside it which handle their own separate levels of detail. So when it comes to rendering I find out which ones can be seen (check out \"nodes drawn\") and draw them at an appropriate level of detail. That though, requires far too much GPU bandwidth so what I actually do is compile them all together into 1 list of vertices and draw them in 1 go, while the vertices permanently sit in graphics memory.

The main problem with loading/unloading the cells will be hitches every now and again while the cells are loaded and prepared, much like there are in Oblivion if you\'re played that which probably uses Quadtree terrain with LOD.

Just because I love you all so much;

You can see the different levels of detail in the patches here. Try to ignore the sky dome

( Edited 03.04.2008 01:44 by knighty )

Sexy. What do you use for modeling, Graeme?

My friend does all the modeling and he uses 3ds max. The terrain is still randomly generated. The Helipad is just a box I model with code

Quick update:

I\'ve done a few bits of optimising to speed up the tree rendering. I\'ve also got it so I can save/load terrain and the cells are now 512 x 512, can I can load a bunch of them. Now I just need to get them to load on the fly with different levels of detail.

Decided to take a couple of new pics.

Here\'s an island covered in snow ;P

And here it is at sunset. The day/night cycle is all done dynamically and handles colour shifting at dawn/dusk.

PS. Ignore the floating thrusters, protip: 3D mesh rotation is hard

( Edited 04.04.2008 14:03 by knighty )

do you look good doing it.

What <_< I always look good baby. <_<;

Yes I'm a sucker for sunsets. Obviously as you can see the sky is now coloured and has a sun (and moon).

Damn you people and your lack of interest! I know it's because you're annoyed that in a week I've beaten any existing Wii graphics but come on (I'm not serious btw <_<) Anyway

Reflections ^^. Got a lot of work to do to optimise them and need to add some flags to my objects so I can determine what to draw in reflections (it's obviously a waste of time rendering trees in the middle of the island for example). But yeah, it's coming along.... I'm not going to bother with refractions because they provide minimal visual improvement at the cost of a lot of speed.

Hey we arn't your personal cheer leaders, go get your ego massaged somewere else.

Good work and everything though. I don't have alot of interest in the subject so thats all your getting.

Blade2t3 said:
Hey we arn't your personal cheer leaders, go get your ego massaged somewere else.

I'm only joking

Calm down! *slaps Knighty*

I was just messing with ya. Look I'm even bumbing your thread!

Me too! Yay for bumping! XD

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

Make the sun a bit bigger though.

My brother said that as well...

But to me it seems perfect. Thanks anyway.

First version of grass up and running:

Needs volumetric cloud shadows.