CAST II Landscape Demo

[Mirage]

Hello people!

I've updated my engine.;)

Major changes:
* huge landscape with smooth dynamic LOD support added
* new demo (landscape + trees) demo available download (~16MB) (http://www.casteng.com/download/C2Land.zip)
* editor updated
* documentation updated

Complete SDK download (~25MB) (http://www.casteng.com/download/CAST2SDK.zip)

Screenshot:
http://www.casteng.com/screens/Trees1_sm.jpg (http://www.casteng.com/screens/Trees1.jpg)

Landscape in the demo is based on 2048x2048 height map. View depth is about 2000 tiles. This is achived by using smooth LOD algorithm (so no jerky LOD switches like in Oblivion and others) based on projected grid.

From now the updates will be less major but much more frequent.

Welcome to http://www.casteng.com/

[Traveler]

This is getting better with each update. I've tried your sample and it's running nice and smooth.

Looking forward to seeing more of this.

Bumped to news.

[chronozphere]

That looks very sweet. Good job. :)

I miss the contrast a little bit. It would be great to have a lot of light and dark colors. HDR-lighting and shadows would add a lot of realism to your scene.

But nevertheless i think it's a great piece of work. Keep it up. ;)

[Mirage]

Thanks guys!

Seems that the demo runs without problems?

I've added lighting for trees:
http://casteng.com/screens/TreeLight_TnT.jpg
Looking much better, despite taking the screenshot from old Riva TnT!

I'll add animation and may be shadows for trees and update the demo.

[Mirage]

I've slightly updated the demo:
* added lighting on trees
* added trees animation
* added light source animation

Download (~14MB) (http://www.casteng.com/download/C2Land.zip)

Screen:
http://www.casteng.com/screens/Trees1_sm.jpg

More screens (http://www.casteng.com/gallery.shtml)

[NecroDOME]

I only say the screenshots, but can you add more trees and plants?
Anyways it looks nice so far!

What are you using for rendering? DX, OpenGL? fixed function pipeline or shaders?

[Mirage]

I only say the screenshots, but can you add more trees and plants?
Anyways it looks nice so far!

What are you using for rendering? DX, OpenGL? fixed function pipeline or shaders?

Yes, I'll add more.
The engine potentially supports multiple API. Currently DirectX 8.1 implemetation used.
For videocards with shader support I use shader, for older hardware - FFP.

[Mirage]

Good news: People reporting that the demo work on Linux under Wine.:)
Bad news: Engine demos compiled by Free Pascal with full optimizations turned on are crashing.:)
With optimizations switched off the demos working well.

[Chebmaster]

1. The waves on the land near you when you turn the camera are *ugly*.
2. Often crashes with InvalidOp when turning around, but the fact is the engine seems to be used DX8 when running in Linux (Wine 0.9.56)


compiled by Free Pascal with full optimizations turned on are crashing
Not all optimization options in FPC work yet. You must check them one by one and weed out those that cause the crashing.

[chronozphere]

1. The waves on the land near you when you turn the camera are *ugly*.


Yeah... i tried your last demo and i also noticed this. When you move your camera close to the land and start moving the mouse, you see the land shaking. Looks really weird. :?

The rest of it looks fantastic. It runs great on my machine (vista ultimate). :)

[Mirage]

Glad to hear that it works under Vista.
The "waves" are caused by LOD algorithm. In current implementation vertex buffer is updated every time when the camera is rotated. This causes low performance and visible LOD artifacts.
Later I'll add an implemetation of the same algorithm without thee need of updating landscape when the camera rotates. It's less effective in vertices usage, but free of artifacts and much faster when user rotates the camera heavily.
Current implementation is perfect for top-view games, like strategies or fly sims.
The alternative will do well for first-person view.