GDC \'05

[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