Outerra forum
Anteworld - Outerra Game => Terrain & terrain data issues => Topic started by: Kviki on April 23, 2012, 02:52:48 pm
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Fog
- there is no fade effect when above the fog, fade effect appears when you enter it.
- fog dissapears above water
Both shown here: http://i.imgur.com/TX06V.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/TX06V.jpg)
*also yay for the river!
Sea
- Transparent waves, can see terrain through it
- Its very dark underwater
Atmosphere
- I find that the atmosphere is rather bright/dense, sometimes when I'm at a lower altitude, I'm having problems distinguishing water from the land because the atmosphere brightens up both sea and land alot.
Terrain
- Spikes on the ground, especially on dirt (appears on snow too) http://i.imgur.com/mIlIS.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/mIlIS.jpg)
- 90° coasts/islands http://i.imgur.com/gzHqO.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/gzHqO.jpg) my guess is because of the low resolution data.
- in my opinion, the ground (flat terrain/meadow) is way too deformed, too many bumps, which are VERY noticable at
sunset/rise
- textures don't tile well at the default ''max terrain level generated - 22 (7.5)'' (they do tile on 23)
It would be pretty awesome if terrain could look like this up-close http://i.imgur.com/1gtj2.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/1gtj2.jpg) rather than http://i.imgur.com/NfUaw.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/NfUaw.jpg)
That's about it.
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Thank goodness it is all adjustable. The Bumpy grass was a recent (year old) addition that can be adjusted. The fog has attenuation half depth that will make it a more subtle transition and the coasts need to be refined based on coastal charts instead of just raw point data.
Nothing in your post upsets me since I know it can all be fixed with two shakes of a lambs tail.
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Nothing in your post upsets me since I know it can all be fixed with two shakes of a lambs tail.
;D ;D ;D
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None of these points is a bug. Its just unfinished yet. Your post sounds a bit insolent so far. And like zeos said before. Many of your "points" are adjustable. But i'm wondering about your comprehension at physics. I thought, that atmosphere and fog were physic-based. So the viewable results should be almost physically correct. Maybe your experiences weren't. Btw there are some sliders for adjusting atmosphere-settings. Maybe they will make you happy..
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Light Fog (http://i.minus.com/iI8Z1vHHhSYNw.png)
Heavy Fog (http://i.minus.com/i1o9vAUzGgoim.png)
And finally bumpy grass before and after.. http://outerra.blogspot.com/2011/05/bumpy-grass-effect.html (http://outerra.blogspot.com/2011/05/bumpy-grass-effect.html)
(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PjgzcrldqyA/Tcg2Ei0BzUI/AAAAAAAAAGw/scsszsT-yes/s1600/grass1o.jpg)
(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-J7pghQul-0g/Tcg1_Jau3HI/AAAAAAAAAGs/z4xl42P48KY/s1600/grass1n.jpg)
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I'm sure Kviki just meant to give a constructive criticism, no need to be overly defensive, necro ;)
- there is no fade effect when above the fog, fade effect appears when you enter it.
Technically it's correct, the fog would look like that if it was perfectly level. It looks like there's no fade, but that's because rays enter it at a sharp angle and the fog accumulates quickly. Once there's a wavy modulation of the fog height, it will look more natural.
- I find that the atmosphere is rather bright/dense, sometimes when I'm at a lower altitude, I'm having problems distinguishing water from the land because the atmosphere brightens up both sea and land alot.
I think it will be solved by adaptive HDR. The atmosphere is modeled physically, but the amount of aerosol fog can greatly vary from the default value; certainly it won't work for every location in the world and every moisture condition as is.
in my opinion, the ground (flat terrain/meadow) is way too deformed, too many bumps, which are VERY noticable at sunset/rise
Will go away once the grass is 3D, remember this now is just an envelope of grass chunks.
The rest are bugs.
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Will go away once the grass is 3D
That is something not previously discussed. Any hints on the wild and ingenious technique you have devised to render a billion tiny blades of grass?
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yah zeos.. its called level of detail ;D you dont have to render grass, if its not visible. Certainly you can use a similar techique like for trees. There will be trees and they dont have to be rendered from a far distance ;)
especially for grass there are several possibilities. You can render dupliverts, or particles, or billboards, or... a huge amount of grass doesnt mean a performance leak. And you know, OT wouldnt be OT, if there were no solution for a given problem ;O
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3D grass will go only to a distance where it's still discernible. The envelope will gradually go down, exposing the blades and making a smooth transition. That's why the tires go through the bumps of grass now - the bumps are just the envelope of grass. The blades will be rendered using a technique similar to how the 3D trees and some other internal mechanisms work - minimum bandwidth required, maximum GPU utilization. They must fit the prescribed bumpy shape, get the correct atmospheric lighting and inherit the fractal colorization to match the existing environment. But everything is quite doable.
What you see now is basically a fallback to a non-blade bumpy grass for slower cards :)
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Your work Cameni is without a doubt the most ambitious project I have ever seen. I won't even ask some questions for the very fact that I know you are probably already creating a solution for it. 3d grass was in my head but I never asked about it, and, here you are talking about it.
Another thing, people will eventually have to upgrade their cards as the world won't stop spinning because their card is too slow to handle all the features of OT. it's called technological evolution, it's a pity though that it is money that primarily holds people back (which is fair enough). There will always be people left behind because of this.
Do you have a road map for Outerra that defines what point(s) of development will require better hardware, or, will you just create sliders to let the user reduce quality? This way you can really push hardware to the max but have it adjustable for the slower hardware.
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I don't know about any points of development that would specifically require a better hardware, I mean it's hard to tell since the variety of hw is that large. We know we could do some things better with SM5 level graphics hardware (that's ≥400 Nvidia and 5000 ATI, I think). One day it may come to that, but currently we don't feel the pressure that much to have a point in time where we'd cut off the support for older cards.
Someday there will be features that require a better hardware, but there should be always a fallback for older cards.