[quote]How the [any bad word] do you get the terrain tile textures to look so [another bad word] good? Smooth transitions and big nice patterns in the textures (especially the rocky stuff) etc etc…
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Just a guess, but by looking at those shots, it looks like texture splatting to me.
Sure it can! (Not falling for this lame attempt to have a laugh - inte en chans 
).
/M
Mojo: Is that what you use in your engine? I just feel very reluctant to implement it since I want decent performance on low-end cards, but perhaps it is the price I’ll have to pay to make it look nice…
/M
We used to do texture splatting (you might remember earlier posts by me), but that was either too slow on low end cards or had to be disabled at short range giving an ugly transition a few hundred meters ahead.
Instead, we chose to go back to the tried-and-true tiled single texturing with a detail texture applied.
- The total texture size is 40964096 which is cut up in pieces depending on the max texture size of the gfx card. Texture compression helps a lot to bring down the memory requirements. Our landscape resolution is now 10241024 points, giving us 16 texels per square meter.
- A detail texture is applied that gives the impression of detail even at close distances. It’s mipmaps are alpha faded to cut it off at high distances.
- The color texture is generated in an elaborate process to cut down download requirements and to enable us to randomly generate new worlds: First, the five principal structure textures are generated containing sand, rock, grass, dirt etc. Then an alpha map for each layer is generated at a resolution of 1024*1024. The final texture is then generated on the gfx board by repeatedly uploading a structure texture and it’s alpha layer and blending it to a Pbuffer. The process is still slow, but we are optimizing that part as we speak Furthermore, the structure textures can be cached after being built once.
The result is that on cards with at least two texture units, the entire landscape can be rendered in one pass at a high framerate. Our lowest specs are currently an athlon 700 Mhz with a gf2mx card that happens to be my development machine right now It runs the bare bones landscape in 80-100 fps. That is, with out any cut off distances, fog and what have you. Our primary rendering bootleneck is large armies in high detail mode (400 polys each) and fill rate from the massive amount of trees.
- elias
Ah, I thought it was something like that. The top-down view with the roads looked very much like a single texture.
Good choice. =)
And, heh, the biggest bottleneck in wurm on low end hardware is fillrate for trees as well. 
So when’s the tech demo/alpha/beta/commercial release? =D
Thank you for the reply! I will definitly try a similar approach and pray it looks nothing like what I have today… 
/M
[quote]Mojo: Is that what you use in your engine?
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No, I too use a single texture with a detail texture applied. I do generate the terrain texture dynamically and procedurally based on the heightmap. So, I used multiple input textures (usually 4) and blend them into a single texture based on height. For example, where the height is the highest I might use pure rock texture, blend that into dirt, blend into grass, blend into sand. This gives a nice translation of color as you climb a mountain or something.
However, texture splatting interests me, and I’m not concerned about lower end cards. So, I think I’ll be looking into it real soon.
Political correctness is highly over-rated in games.
One thought I did have, as a way to lessen the negative impact your game will have on those -weaker- minds who find (pretty much) anything offensive, is to have a Celtic tribe running around in the game as well. You could even have a few bare assed white men running around as well (since some of the Celts used to go into battle naked).
Of course, then you’re going to have women complaining that your game is sexist rather than racist, unless you have naked women running around in the game as well…
…and then when you put the naked women in, you’re going to have the conservative feminist far right complaining about exploitation of women, so you’ll have to replace all the people with animal representations of people…
…and then there will be complaints from the anti genetic engineering movement that you’re promoting GE by using mutated animals in your game…
…so you’ll have to replace all the animals with amoeba-like blobs…
…which a bio-tech company will discover looks remarkably like something that they’ve just patented, so they’ll sue you for theft of company secrets, and of course, the CIA will get involved because someone in the Middle East has downloaded your game and now knows how to make a killer virus based upon the specifications provided in your game, so you’ll spend the rest of your days in a federal lockup.
Sucks to be you dude!
[quote]conservative feminist far right
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A little offtopic but…
isn’t that an oxymoron. Feminists tend to be (always?) liberal.
I don’t think they’re that liberal when you’re talking about women appearing in games (i.e. the large breasted, skimpy clothed, not-strictly-based-on-reality women).
We have a new batch of screenshots online showing some of the slightly improved scenery.
Enjoy.
Niiiice! =D that thumbs up icon