3d landscape engine - including grass and trees

[czar]

Most of you won't be aware there is a rather interesting thread running at

http://www.ericbehme.de/phpBB2DAN/viewtopic.php?t=151 ('http://www.ericbehme.de/phpBB2DAN/viewtopic.php?t=151')

where Dan and Huehnerschaenders have been working on a 3d landscape engine with grassfield engine combined.

Using shaders Dan has improved thee perfomance of the engine 5 fold. Even if you aren't doing anything with DanJetX it is worth taking a look at their results.

http://upload4.postimage.org/1810518/rock2_378.jpg (http://upload4.postimage.org/1810518/photo_hosting.html) http://upload4.postimage.org/1810520/grasslayers_110.jpg (http://upload4.postimage.org/1810520/photo_hosting.html)

[WILL]

Hey czar,

Nice screenies... I tried to put this item on the News page, but it seems that it won't work. :?

Do try to resize the images next time though. Any image thats wider than 640 will not fit properly and we'll have to resize for you. Thanks! ;)

[czar]

Hi Will,

sorry posted in a hurry - baby started crying :)

I linked the images straight from Firle's website - I thought that would be ok - next time I will resize first

[Traveler]

Wow,... very nice!

I especially like the one on the lower right.

[WILL]

Oh np czar. Personally I think they look great. The size that I had to settle on imho doesn't do the screenies justice. I'd much rather have them at least at the 640 width, but the site just doesn't let me for some strange reason. :?

[Luuk van Venrooij]

I must say this looks very impressive. Runs great. Hope to get this kind of grass/plants in my engine two :D

[Huehnerschaender]

Any news from that planta engine you were talking about Luke?

The engine we are building uses DirectX. As far as I know you are with OpenGL in your engine, am I right?

But the basics would not be too hard to convert to OpenGL I guess.

[Huehnerschaender]

Some progress:

http://www.dino-it.de/water1.jpg (http://www.dino-it.de/water.jpg)

Greetings,
Dirk

[NecroDOME]

It looks fantastic! Nice graphics!! :clap: :drool: :thumbup:

[Huehnerschaender]

It's just my programmers art :)
But I am satisfied so far, too :wink:

[NecroDOME]

I see you made good progress!! Nice work man!!

http://www.ericbehme.de/phpBB2DAN/viewtopic.php?t=151&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=225

[Nitrogen]

Cool, it looks like you using alpha testing or the discard function of a pixelshader...

Have you thought about full alpha transparency on your grass and leaves? It would make it SOOO much better! So instead of a grass pixel being 'drawn' or 'not drawn' you make it transparent?

[Traveler]

oh wow,.. :shock:

Please do make some updates here as well, please. :D

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi folks :)

I stopped developing this thing at the moment. It was just a little playground for me, I never intended to make a game out of it, because this kind of stuff is good for a First Person Game and those are a little too much for a 1 man team :)

I am on a little game right now, which I will post about, when I have a good thing to show. It has nothing to do with this landscape/grass/trees stuff. I decided to make a little game I can finish alone.

After that my plans go to converting Iron Strike to the Asphyre version, which should be released the next days. Then I will release Iron Strike here.

So don't expect any updates for this topic recently. I will do things on it, when I have time to play around again :)

Nitrogen: The Alpha channel is intentionally discarded. This way I don't have to z-sort the grass which makes it really slow with this amount of grass segments.
Using Alpha and no sorting causes artifacts. Alpha + Sorting makes it look much better, but slows the whole thing down so much, that it is useless.

Greetings,
Dirk