Tough one... for those with RTS experience
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Tough one... for those with RTS experience
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| I dunno if it's even possible with blitz, but I want to do maps like used in WC3(Warcraft III). The tiling used in it makes me think it isnt doable in blitz, at least not quickly. Anyone know of any tutorials on this type of thing? Or articles on simple theory? |
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| I guess it might be achieved with alphablended vertices on a custom made terrain... uses lots of surfaces tho.. |
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| yeah possible :) Use a quadmesh based, vertex alpha blended, multisurface terrain mesh. Hope that doesn't sound scary? ;) |
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| nah, but general info on starting such a project is hard to come by. The start is often the hardest. |
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| I can do this, but it's gonna take about 20-26 surfaces per map, depending on how big the tile sets are. |
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| Well if you do it properly 8-10 surfaces should be more then sufficient. |
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| care to explain that one? :) |
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| well you have as many soils as you have surfaces (on one map that is) go ahead and count: seabottom,ground (dark),asfalt , sand, grass, rock, snow, etc. if you need more then 8-10 on one map your kinda goingover the top! |
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| You need only one texture (surface) for each terrain type.. because when using vertex alpha, you blend a tile with all the surrounding tiles.. eliminating the need for fringe tiles.. if I understood it correctly ;) |
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| so your saying to use a base surface type then, essentially patch the other surface types over it? That probably would reduce surface counts alot.. |
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| yeah that's about what I was suggesting. |
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| I've noticed the warcraft3 maps have a lot of fringe elements. Its an old technique in 2d games where everything was made out of tiles. You have say.. urm.. a pile of hay. The pile of hay fills on tile but overlaps other tiles. So for one haystack tile, you actually draw a 3*3 tile. however, they did this on their own wacked out hi-res heightfield doohicky which I really think is quite cool. You could make one big bitmap and then cut it up into sections and paste each section to a heightfield/mesh type system. So, if each heightfield had a 128*128 texture and there were 64 sections set into an 8*8 grid, then I think you'd be getting pretty close to what warcraft looks like. That'd probably be the easiest way. Maybe not the best way. If you used a bunch of different heightfields, you'll notice the seams where they meet because the normals wouldnt be the same. But if you made them meshes, you could smooth the seams out. I really have no idea if this would work that well since I've never tried it. But it seems quite feasible. |
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