G.T.A.2 Map Editor

[hwnd]

Worked a bit on generation of minimaps (map thumbnails) (256x256 in size). Few examples:









It's not final ofc. I noticed some small problems with it. It's skips some things.

[User137]

It looks cool, but why so red/yellow city?

[hwnd]

Actually the maps are not yellow, just minimaps, just the way i generate colors, i take some color and then take into account the actual Z of the X,Y,Z loop and doing "COLOR or Z" logical op. And take into account the "ground type" at current X,Y,Z This results the "yellow" minimaps.
Now if i look at them i think they are too yellow.

I work with 64x64 tiles, there can be max 991 of them. Its very slow to actually loop through entire map and resize all textures to 1x1 pixel and draw bmp, this way it would match colors of actual map but i have to find a faster way of doing this. I did some quick tests. Of course i did all in one X,Y,Z "triple" loop. Alot of repeating.

Will try something else later.


Also i made the camera move to work with mouse dragging on the minimap. Even on the scaled down version of minimap which i needed very much, because 256x256 on the form is way too big.
Very simple math. Sadly i didn't figure out this by myself but thanks to one open source fpc project. But it works perfectly.

[hwnd]

Found a bit of motivation to fix bug with rendering of flat (transparent) faces. Marked as arrows:





What i have to do for rendering and picking such faces is to add additional vertex coords for all slopes.
When i do picking i have to check if face is flat or not and process specific vertex data.
I tried this method on few slopes and it worked fine.

Also i fixed today the flickering of flat faces (graffiti) on the walls. Added a 0.001 value.

EDIT: also added minimap to editor and navigating on the map when moving small rectangle on the minimap with mouse. Minimaps are not yellow now, i still have to tweak it but not much.
That's all for now. Gtg to sleep.

[hwnd]

I finally fixed problems with slopes 49-52. All there is now with slopes is to add flat faces (not all slopes can have them) and add picking code back.
Some slopes do not have flat faces but i must verify each slope in GTA2 to actually see how it renders each slope flat faces.

Also i added the LID shading (fake shadows) which do look pretty good.
Arrows show the thing.

[User137]

Do you have rendering order for transparent surfaces? With Z-buffer alone they would show up bugged depending on camera angle.

[hwnd]

I guess you mean Z fighting? I had these problems, it was very ugly when i rotated the cam and i solved it with small value (0.001) added / subtracted from either Z or X vertex coords and now they don't flicker.
The faces are drawn with that tiny offset but it's very hard to see anything unless you look very close to the flat face.
And no, i don't have any specific order of rendering.

Atm, im trying to draw zones (areas) with nx.CreatePlane with specific colors and alpha (so you can see through it).

[phibermon]

It depends on how the type of transparency if you need to sort transparent meshes, it's hard to tell from the screenshots if the textures are fully blended with an 8 bit alpha channel (requires sorting, think an additive blend of a fire particle system) or if pixels of a certain colour are discarded (results in 'sharp' edges where the transparent coloured pixels would meet the textured pixels, so no actual blending of Source Colour to Destination, does not require sorting).

For extra FPS in any renderer, you should render front to back to minimize overdraw (zbuffer discards fragments before they're rasterized if they're behind what's already been written(drawn) to the buffer(Screen).

For a top down view on a planar world (like GTA2 maps) you probably wouldn't save much to make sorting a worthwhile option as very little is rendered behind visible geometry. However if the camera is looking out across the map from an FPS like perspective then you'll benifit from sorting before you render each frame.

I see that the visible portion of the map in your editor is clipped to a quad that is centered on the cameras position, are you also able to render the map clipped to the cameras view frustum? I think it'd be awesome if you could walk around the map in first person!