GDC \'05

[Reno]

yea, imagine that, but WW2, + shaders

[Reno]

oh yea.....
GDC \'05 is gunna be a good one indeed.

GG released a nice shot demoing the terrain and water:
http://www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=961

mmmm.....pretty.
That is done with 2 terrain blocks, each having their own texture densities(so you could make small really high quality texture rubble piles if you want...or just high quality ground textures in general)
The smaller of the 2 terrain blocks is still quite a bit bigger than the largest stock TGE terrain block size(TSE supports a 10km view range )

and as for the water capabilities:
\"no it\'s not based on the TGE water at all. Complete rewrite. You can have multiple blocks and transform and scale them as you like. Making a stream or a river might be a little tricky but you can do it. The wave movement is scriptable so you can control the direction(s) the water flows as well. You also have control over the water color, clarity, Fresnel parameters, bumpmaps, cubemaps, etc.
Yes, the water can be used in interiors as well, reflects stuff nicely.\"

[andius]

WOW!! That looks great. So is TTR: whatever, going to look like that? or similar?

[djs]

Villemus Wrote:

Jonathan Wrote:Very nice! (I\'m somewhat surprised by the huge community interest in the engine... :roll:

Well, it is the engine that you guys are using, so we want to know what it\'s capable of. Besides, that\'s only TGE, TSE should look even better.

Yeah, to be honest I wasn\'t as awe struck as some other where, in fact it looked basic in quite a few areas, however when I realised this wasn\'t the shader engine, I looked on it in a different light [sic]

[Reno]

welp, GDC ended, and to show it they released some high res shots of the terrain/water.

heres a pretty good water one:
http://public.garagegames.com/brianr/SSO..._00001.jpg

and a terrain/water one:
http://public.garagegames.com/brianr/SSO..._00006.jpg

heres are some spiffy things to be said about this stuff:
Quoted from Ben Garney:
\"Hey guys. Quick rundown on the TSE terrain tech:

- Supports paging of large areas, limited only by your HD size.
- Supports very large textures stretches over the terrain. Right now the largest supported is 64k by 64k (the max size of a JPEG), but that limit will be raised.
- Fogging and detail maps.
- Very fast rendering (the raw tech can run on even a gf2 in a laptop at >60 fps, although naturally the shaderized version requires a GF3 or higher).
- Can have arbitrary geometry as part of the terrain for no extra cost. (Although there\'s only one texture for the terrain, so you can\'t really do arbitrary modelling.)
- Very cheap on CPU, about 2% of frametime.
- Supports very high view distances, in fact, much higher than the hardware does. We ran this demo at about 4km view distance. I frequently run at 12km, but the Z-buffer on most cards isn\'t high enough to give reliable results at the scale.
- Always has smooth transitions (morph is enforced as new LODs page in).

As for the tools that go with it, well, I\'ll talk about those when they\'re a bit more mature.

The whole design goal with the TSE terrain and water was to make some stuff that doesn\'t suck, and I think we\'ve acheived that goal. That said, I didn\'t see much of anything out there on the GDC floor that was better looking, and plenty of stuff that looked a lot worse.\"

and again:
\"Actually, the apparent texture density in that case would be something like 32-64 texels/meter due to detail maps. I have some thoughts that might be able to bump that up to 128-256, but we\'ll see how those go.\"

and one more time:
\"The new terrain will look as good or better close up than the old.

The old terrain is, if I recall correctly, 8tx/meter. There is a detail map which adds some detail, too. The new stuff will have as high or higher of a basic texture density, and probably better detail mapping too.\"

and here\'s his .plan:
http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/8863/7328

So, as we all can see:
TSE owns.
Hardcore.

TSE owns freaking hardcore.
i cant wait to start playing with this stuff

[The_Punisher]

The terrain engine has never really impressed me.