Yes, that sums it up nicely Dink.
Basically, what happened was I had a coded a plantmap system that would allow me to simply draw my maps in a paint program. Well, believe it or not, a few days before the demo was to be released (featuring an outdoor world), boom! The system just stopped working. It was the oddest thing. The plants and trees were loading it at the wierdest places, and were jumpin around the map, etc. So I was forced to make just an indoor map just so you could see the engine of the game. Dink and I were disappointed because one of the main parts of the project that we had worked on the most was the outdoor graphics, so it seemed like all of our work was for nothing.
Eventually for some very odd reason, the system started working again, only now, it loads REALLY slow. So, I'm thinking I may simply dump the system and make all my outdoor maps using this new editor. Making a plant map in paint IS a lot faster than typing in numbers in DBP, but it's even faster to do it in real time 3D, so I don't have to save the plant map file and compile an exe and test it. This works really well now; the scene show above was made in only about 15 minutes...really, I can make instant forests in about 1 minute, then spend a few extra mintutes adding special touches.
Quote: "I'm lovin' it! Are you going to use it in Time Front: Battle of the Ages???"
Thanks.
As for what I'm going to use this editor for, like Dink said, we are making a couple projects on the side, separately, and so I'll use it for that. Our projects are not small, so it'd be unrealistic to say that we will finish it all at once and then come back to Time Front. I think though that when I do get tired of the other one, I will move back to this one, get it out of that cheesy indoor map, and back into great outdoors, using this editor. You may or may not see our side projects...that depends wheather or not we decide to post them up here, but we are working, and, wheather or not we finish anything
, it's fun just to code and make games.
Quote: "Can you post snapshots from the level editor itself and not from a map you say you've made ?
what is your computer configuration ? (to maintain 60fps ... not all computers can )"
Yep! That's my editor. Like I said, I have no interface. It may not be the most fancy app out there, but it gets the job done, and, like I said, I prefer the keyboard shortcuts over the mouse.
As for the performance, my computer specifications are in my signiture. I realize that I have a very high-end system (at least graphics-wise), but really, if you think about, I'm simply rendering graphics similar in quality to some relatively modern games today, and like those, I plan on having graphics options. Also, I haven't even set up the hide/show system based on distance. The whole scene above is being rendered all at once, even when you are far away. Even with this as the case, I was surprised to find the framerate as good as it is. That is probably because all of the objects you see in the scene are instances (except for the parent objects).
So don't worry...you can expect me to create graphics options in any game that I make when using this level of graphical quality...I'd be a fool otherwise!
Quote: "Wow, it looks beutiful! Do you have collision on all the trees?
It would be cool if you made this into a game were you are a bee or something like that, flying around in the forest, maybe just as a demonstration of your engine?"
Thanks for the compliment. That's actually not a bad idea, but I have other plans in mind.
The trees don't have any collision as of yet...I plan on taking my collision code from Time Front (which is actually a snippet written by Sparky, using his DLL) and will add it to this game. However, there is the problem of instancing and collision; Sparky's DLL can't setup collision on an instance. So, I will probably have a collision editor in my map editor that will allow me to create boxes. I will create tall boxes to put at the base of the trees and that will be juuuust wide enough to cover the width of the tree. Basic sliding collision like that is all I need, and it will maintain performance too.
Quote: "Agreed. 3 1300 poly trees barely runs at 60fps here if they are all behind one another. Of course a 130050 poly terrain runs at 180fps with not much poly overlap. Those screens look like they hav alot of overlap, unless you've come up with some kind of occlusion culling system."
Well, I have the system from my other plant map code that i am going to tweak to fit in with this code. It works by checking the the distance to each plant, say every second, and then hiding and showing the farther and closer plant. Actually though, my system won't load in the whoe map and create an instance for each plant and tree in the entire map! It will create only a few of each, and then just position then on the correct spots, as you walk, using the exact same objects. This will avoid a major memory overload, and, as I have found with DBP, a large drop in the framerate.
I really don't have a rea culling system, save for DBP's built in auto-culling on objects. I'm really trying to raise the performance AND the graphics quality as high as possible, and it's really hard to get a proper balance of the two. =) I do have to consider, though, that graphics ARE advancing, and I can't keep coding my games with a low level of graphics forever...I need to move on to a modern level of graphics, and people need to upgrade! Indeed, more and more people are moving up in graphics hardware, which is exciting for us game developers who want our games to be visually impressive.
Uncle Sam
Nvidia Geforce 7950GT 512MB PCIEx, 2.66 GHZ Pentium 4 proccessor, 1GB RAM
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