Re: [Plib-users] terrain generation...

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

ha...@sl... wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know of a good place to look for documentation about the
> different methods of doing terrain in a 3D world?

It's a VERY deep subject.

Read the archives of the 'gdalgorithms' mailing list. (I don't know
where those are - but Google-Can-Be-Your-Friend).  There have been
literally hundreds of high quality posts on the subject in the past
couple of months.  There was a period of several weeks when almost
nothing else was talked about and the mail traffic was in the 'dozens
per day' range.

> I know one formula for doing terrains is to use a grey scale bitmap to
> determine the terrain.  Using the lightness or darkness of a pixel to
> determine the height of that part of the terrain.
> 
> Of course, I have no idea how to apply such an algorithm to a real-time
> game.  If I pre-generated the ground as a model based on the texture, it
> would take the poly count for the scene off the scale.

Not necessarily.  That's exactly how the 'TuxRacer' game works.  You
can design your own levels using GIMP!

Look in the PLIB examples under 'majik' - that's a terrain generator
that uses height-maps.
 
You could also look at the FlightGear system - they are BIG TIME
terrain people and some of their solutions are working out very
well.  FlightGear also uses PLIB.  There is a sister project called
TerraGear that deals with creating terrain from raw real-world
data.

IIRC, the FlightGear web site used to have an essay I wrote about
terrain systems - if it's still there, it would be a good place to
visit first because it's a very top-level overview of the available
techniques and their problems.  That essay may have moved to the
TerraGear site after the split - or I may just have dreamt the whole
thing!

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>
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