Amazing what a little bit of light can do

Here are some more screenshots of my terrain engine.

This has specular highlights enabled, tiled textures, a new alpha blended sun texture (a billboard as well), and several other new features that might not be apparent from the screenies.

Real soon I'm putting in a sun glare quad that will be alpha blended with the screen to simulate the white out you get when you look at the sun.

The sun direction is taken into account during the render. I'm simply taking the sun position vector, normalizing it, and using that normal vector for my actual directional light. The sun is no longer a point sprite and so when you go behind a hill....it is clipped by the terrain geometry properly and it is also blended into the sky rather nicely as well.

Next step is to make the terrain so that it never ends no matter how far you walk off into the horizon. Not hard to do. Also some level of detail texturing is in order as well as blending in other tiles to create better looking terrain.

Overall its going well and I'm rather excited about its progress.

It still uses Direct3D's crappy vertex lighting but I'm writing a pixel shader for it which is soon to be implemented.

Another screenie from a different angle

Another sun - I like this one better

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bubba

Real soon I'm putting in a sun glare quad that will be alpha blended with the screen to simulate the white out you get when you look at the sun.

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Are you referring to lens flare?

Your engine keeps looking better and better every time I look at it. Have you put it on the internet yet, or plan on it? I'd like to see it in action.

What do you plan on doing with this engine when you are done. Is it just going to be a terrain demo, or are you going to make a game from it?

This looks amazing! I love the look of the third sun! Keep it up mate!

Looks very nice

Its going to be a game....but I'm concentrating right now on the outside terrain engine. I'm sick of games having linear terrain where you can fall off of the map or you get to explore 'on rails'.


Theoretically this engine will be able to handle any size terrain set so an entire planet could be modeled down to any resolution desired. I'm planning on getting some DEM maps and creating an entire map of the United States. My main problem is textures. The height data is easy to get but the textures are not. Another idea is to slightly curve the terrain so that if you gain enough altitude...the planet will begin to drop out from under you. This will require some insane viewing distances but I think its possible.

Per pixel lighting probably will not be computed on all tri's - only the ones in the foreground since this drops the framerate even with cards that support pixel shaders. The stencil buffer is there but not active yet and will be used for shadowing - I really want the terrain to shadow onto itself but this might be too much for the hardware.

If any of you have images of trees, foliage, etc, I really need some. There is no way I can model 3D trees all over the terrain and still get good frame rates. The images can be any size...preferably in BMP format so no detail is lost. I will convert them to cutouts and DDS files myself so don't worry about that.

If any of you wish to help with this project...please let me know because it is quickly becoming rather large and I need more design ideas as well.

All I ask is that you know C/C++ quite well and are familiar with 3D graphics.