Hi all

At the moment I'm pondering a "Flight game" with an isometric view....

One thing that I'm not 100% sure about is how to create the Groundterrain for it.

For one, it will only play at higher altitudes, so the terrain doesn't need to be detailed at all.... but now I got some questions in regard to making this in Esenthel engine:

1) Is it possible to use a very coarse Heightmap resolution for the Terrain? For example, for a 1024x1024 Heightmap, I'd like to stretch it over 16KM ingame (if my game takes place at 10KM Altitude, and I want a 4x4 KM "Playground", I need 16x16 KM Terrain for a 45° isometric view).
For that I would need to have 16x16 meters per Heightfield. Now, as far as I'm aware, 2x2 meters is the max with the Esenthel Terrain engine... did I miss something? Can I set the Heightfield size to 16x16 Meters?

2) Another Route would be to ditch the Esenthel Terrain and use a Mesh created in an external 3D Program... but even a 1024x1024 Grid would lead to the mesh having over 2 Million tris! Of course I could create a "smarter" Mesh with less Polygons, It would still be a lot. I'm not 100% sure how Esenthel would treat the nonvisible Polygons before sending the Mesh to the graphics card... would they be discarded without much performance impact?

3) How could I for one have a visible range of, for example, 500 meters for my gameobjects and everything taking part in the game at 10 KM Altitude, but still have the Terrain mesh about 10 KM below be visible all the time?


On another topic, I've just seen the Editor 2.0. I'm impressed, the weakest link of Esenthel, the Editor, looks now much better usabilitywise. And the price sounds fair.

But one small thing especially got my attention, as it might prove useful for my flight game:

4) There is now an Option for color on the Heightmap import.... does that mean I can feed in an externally created Color texture to automatically texturize my terrain? Must the resolution need to be the same as the heightmap resolution? Can I combine these color texture with normally tiled Textures? Can I use this color texture to automatically assign the correct tiling texture to the heightfields by extending the editor (that would be a-m-a-z-i-n-g!)?


Thanks for any help


Gian-Reto

I can't give you answers about the heightmap, but I can tell you that Esenthel doesn't support isometric cameras. You can fake it a little by using a custom FOV, but it's still a perspective view.
Additionally, are you sure you would want an isometric view with a flight game? Isometric nullifies any sense of distance and scale, things that I would deem important to flight.

Well, about the isometric view.... I meant in a non-literal way as "45° view from above"... maybe I should be more precise with my language

And the game is not meant as simulation or action game, but more as a strategy title... if that really works with fast planes and midair im not sure myself, but I'd like to experiment with it.... anyway, the point is, things like distance and scale the system /unit AI would take care of, or, if important to the player, there would be tools to measure it.

And also, if the view is not topdown, the terrain becomes even more of a problem as long as there is not an incredible amount of Fog involved, which would be kind of a throwback to the good old Nintendo 64 days...


Anyway, thanks for the input. I appreciate it, and as said, I'm unsure myself if I can make it work.

Hi,

For the terrain you can try creating default terrain in the Editor, and then make very tiny airplane models, so they seem smaller and terrain seems bigger.

For rendering only objects in nearest 500 meters, you can just manually select which objects to draw. ignore game.world.draw for objects, and manually call draw for each desired object.

EE 1.0 also has the same color+material importing as 2.0 for terrain.
color importing affects only vertex colors of the terrain.

1) Hmmm, thats an interesting idea.
So for example I would use 1/5 Scale, 200 Meters would equal 1 KM in my scale. I assume, as long as I don't use physics I would get away with it...
If I want to use physics, though, how would I need to scale stuff like gravity and forces? Would they need to be 5 times stronger, stay the same, or 5 times weaker?

2) Okay, that sounds good enough. I'll try that later....

3) Hm, still very interesting (and of course I never tried that).... is it possible to set the color to 50% transparent or something to just tint the tiled texture a little bit at some places? Can it be done from code ( So I could do it automatically in a custom editor? )


Thanks for the answers, Esenthel