GeoMipMapped 5x5km terrain without lights. Shows still some cracks, but the result is pretty good for now.
Terrain wireframe and solid
Terrain screenshot
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Monthly Archives: March 2010
3D vision
You hear more and more about 3D in movies and games. So after I saw James Cameron Avatar a second time (and still was impressed) I was wondering how it could be implement it in our 3D engine. The only solution I could came up with it using a red/cyan glass and use the Z-buffer to offset some colors – that’s the cheap solution – and also used in Trackmania Nations.
So after browsing “The Internets” I figured my GeForce 8800GTS has the ability enable NVidia’s 3D Vision. I don’t have a shutter or polarized glass, but I have a red/cyan glass (which also works) so I gave it a try. I tried it on several games and I concluded that not every game is ready for this. For example in FUR it’s just totally crap and the in-car view is horrible because you see it twice! But I also tried some other race games like Clutch (Armageddon Riders – Google/Bing for this and you know what I mean) where the effect is basically perfect!
With this game it really got me started to see the use of 3D Vision in games. Everything just flying off before your head. When I smashed into something you almost need to dive from your chair so you don’t get hit by flying debris! And this all should only be better if you *buy* the NVidia’s 3D Vision glasses together with a 22″ 120Hz monitor!
So how does it work? Well, it due to the frame drops I experienced, I guess the world is rendered twice. Once for the left eye and once for the right eye. But I’m not sure because I didn’t dive into it yet…
After all the conclusion for this 3D experience is that we will make our engine ready for supporting 3D vision.
Terrain
While we are still busy with our next game and engine, I started on terrain rendering.
For now the terrain is brute force rendered, creating a new vertex buffer every frame with no optimizations what so ever. The terrain is infinite, but for now I can only look 200 meters ahead to keep the frame rate up…
Next step is to apply some optimizations so the view distance is 5km+. The technique is still something to dive into and do some experiments.
As for now also we have a basic vegetation engine in place that can place objects (currently a car model from FUR) on the terrain. For now the “cars” are also rendered brute force with frustum culling, we are planning on making some impostor-based approach. Simply said, objects far away, say 100 meters, will be rendered as simple sprites. This reduces render time and thus can we display more tree’s on screen.
Screenshots come soon… stay tuned!