Quote: "You need an image for that inventory or else it looks like you put a grid on top of some objects "
Yeah, it looks pretty crappy right now
. But I'm putting off GUI and other post production stuff for when the time is right.
Mike-> Thanks man
!
Sven, French GUI-> Appreciate it
Quote: "[edit] hmm, just read you've called it 'infinite land'. How does it works?"
My previous method, the one you see in those landscape screenshots, was to create a massive, seamless landscape out of nine advanced terrains and one large heightmap (1536x1536 if I remember correctly). I would then hide the terrains that weren't in use, and I was working on manually hiding terrain limbs that weren't in the camera view (ala the Update Terrain command, which didn't work for my program).
That had a lot of glitches however. For one thing, a goal of mine from the start was to get larger, non-seamless landscapes working by loading up small parts around the player as he walks around the world, and discarding the ones he left behind. However, Advanced Terrain always crashed when I deleted a terrain. Not good. Also, the Advanced Terrains had seams at the borders.
The new terrain system I've been working on I'm quite happy with. It uses a large grid of objects - 288 of them, in fact - which comprise the gameworld. The fact that they're external .x objects means that A) I can align their vertices to get rid of the seams, B) I can carve holes in them for caves, tweak them for roads and rivers, et cetera, and C) I can lightmap them. Oh, also D), I can go the route of a single large texture map and a detail map, or I can manually texture them up-close.
It seems to me to be the best of both worlds - pre-generated worlds, and a dynamic terrain engine. I've only got a very primitive version of the test engine running right now, but the pauses when it discards old and loads new terrain blocks are miniscule. Throw in objects, scripts, et cetera and there will definatly be pauses when walking around in the outdoors, but hopefuly only small ones. And few and far between, because each individual terrain chunk takes minutes to walk across. The gameworld itself is absolutely vast, Morrowind-scale vast, and I think I might set my game on only a small part of it
.
