very very big maps ( terrain ) , possible?

[kadir.basol]

Hello , we have done some photoshop work that extracts some terrain heightmap but ,

FPS decreased much when we scale terrain on settings...

 

like MMORPG games , they have very huge maps.

Is it possible on Unigine ?

 

many separate image maps and load them by stream by camera location... ?

 

Any sample source code or tutorial for this ?

 

Thanks...

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Hi Kadir,

 

If you look at the documentation you will see the following:

• The maximum size of terrain (the height field size) is 65536+1 × 65536+1, which is equivalent to the vertex count. "
  

With a step size of 1 (1 meter per pixel, which is a nice enough resolution to work at), this equals 65.536 km squared of terrain..... however this is not a practical image size to work at, as no terrain generation software can happily build images of this size, the memory constraints are too great.

 

In my opinion you are better of using multiple smaller terrains - however this has its own challenges and Unigine is not quite ready for doing "infinite" worlds yet .. in fact we are having problems generating even 11 tiles of roughly 8k each due to memory issues.

 

However, Unigine team have stated they are working towards a more robust terrain streaming solution, but when that is ready we do not know.

 

Hope this helps.

[manguste]

many separate image maps and load them by stream by camera location... ?

Streaming is done automatically, it simply comes together with ObjectTerrain that streams and manages its textures by itself.

 

The size of the terrain does not depend on the height map size. 65537 is the maximum number of steps for terrain you can have, while the Step parameter controls how big is this step. So if you have a big number of steps and a small Step, you'll get very detailed small terrain, while if the Step is big, you'll get big and less detailed terrain, all using the same height map.

[kadir.basol]

Will it make Unigine performance bad when we scale terrain ?

or it is not matter to scale terrain scaling ?

[travis.trigg]

This makes me wonder if you have ever considered spherical geometry clip-mapping, or just plain old geometry clip-mapping

(this is aimed at the devs)

[manguste]

Will it make Unigine performance bad when we scale terrain ? or it is not matter to scale terrain scaling ?

Sorry, I don't quite get your question. If you mean terrain scale, it's working fine, there should not be any problems with it.

 

This makes me wonder if you have ever considered spherical geometry clip-mapping, or just plain old geometry clip-mapping (this is aimed at the devs)

In the previous implementation of terrain, a clipmap approach was used for diffuse texture, but the current implementation is way more robust. As for geometry clipmaps, there are no plans to switch to it (no real benefits, problems with cracks).