Spherical Terrain (The Earth Is Not Flat)
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Spherical Terrain (The Earth Is Not Flat)
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| I have only asked one time about Spherical Landscape, SSwift Responded with some good points about Texturing, Heigth Map generations and Gravity affects on the Player Entities. I believe Spherical Terrain , Should be seriously looked into, because I hear alot of people talking about tiling terrains and things like that. Wouldn't it make sense to have a terrain that is like the more natural Globe, Ergo the Earth is not flat!! :) I am not a whiz so I don't know how to program this.. But I think that if enough people are interested. A decent setup might develope. I can take A sphere place it in my progam... And move a player around, Transforming the Gravity vector to always point torwards the center of the Sphere. Things I don't know... Terraforming the Globe, Textures and stuff. Any Ideas? Regards, Eric |
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| The Earth is too FLAT!!! Go here: http://www.flat-earth.org/ or http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm ;) Seriously Eric... good idea but do you realize how big a sphere you are talking about??? Many Polys!!! :) -RZ |
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| While the Earth is not flat, the sphere of the planet is so large that, for viewpoints at human scale, it is best represented as flat. Doing a literal sphere only makes sense for stuff like space sims where the viewpoint is at a cosmic scale. |
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| I think that You are both right, But there has got to be a Use for something like this. A Big Terrain Ball!! Assuming that this was something worthwhile. Give some Ideas. You would never have to worrie about falling off the edge, never have to tile another Terrain. And JHocking yes the earth looks flat from our perspective. So can't a culling system be developed to only draw the portion of the sphere that you can see. Kinda like a boolean subtracted section of a sphere, Like a wedge of an Orange. It would be a certain arc of the sphere. These are just Ideas, I have no clue how to make any one this happen. Regards, Eric |
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| It's handy if your writing a game involving landing on asteroids and stuff. There was a game like this being written that implemented spherical terrains really well. Haven't heard about it in a while tho. |
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| Wouldn't it be possible to speed up such a terrain with the use of culling etc? You would never be able to view the 'entire' earth. Thus if you'd be at position x,y on the cube you'd only need to render the parts of the sphere in a certain radius. Maybe it's possible to slice the sphere in parts, the only render those parts in your radius. This way you could create an endless big planetary terrain and not have any slowdown. The only satback would be the loading time of such a 'slice'. If it's more then a second or so it'd get very annoying having to wait if you leave a certain area and enter the next. Still it's worth the thought. Terraforming a sphere isn't very hard. There are many terraforming algorithms on google, just takes some time to understand. I'll look into this later perhaps. |
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| See I was trying to get my head around the Idea of a height map for a Sherical Terrain... Yeah I know what one looks like.. But how to create it is another thing. I had a Large Sphere in my lunar lander game that I am playing around with. I had no Deformation, just smooth.. I had all the gravity and stuff working... It was cool to be in orbit. But a flat circle with a spherically mapped texture is Crappy. I feel there has to be a good way. I am gonna have to do a bunch of research. Regards, Eric |
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| Dunno if this helps I was looking into this myself |
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| ;- |
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| anyone ever play Populous, The Beginning? This game is pretty old... anyway, every level was a spherical earth. you could walk clear around it. levels (or planets you could say) varied in size, none of them were so huge that the things you are talking about would be an issue, too many polys, etc. it was really beautifully done. how, is the question! but i'm telling you, it's possible, because it's been done. just have to simulate your own gravity if you are doing that kind of thing - in this game there really wasn't any real gravity per se. but, the terrain was 3d. anyway, not millions of textures. i don't know what kind of 2d heightmap you are going to use to define it, but certainly could be done with a 3d program to edit a sphere, don't you think? |
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| Hi ya'll! I've found this webpage on the internet. I don't know if it works, but I'm going to try and implement it in Blitz3D. url |
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| ;- |
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| In the Samples folder there is a similar was that it is done, I think it's under Robs folder. What I was hoping for was a way to translate a Heightmap to a Spherical height Map. |
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| Seen the Blitz game Beltminer? Wonder what happened to it. [edit] Oh, it's in the other thread. |
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| Yeah, I looked at that, And it is somewhat similar to what I want. Don't think they'd share the code, do you?? |
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| http://www.blitzcoder.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/postdisplay.cgi?forum=Forum3&topic=001316 |
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| Thanks I will look at that too... Tell me one thing, What is the coorelation between the Mesh Size and the Heightmap size. Regards, Eric |
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| if you have the same amount of pixel on the heightmap as on the mesh you have a 1 : 1 3D representation of your 2D height data. in any other case it is an interpolation in one or another way |
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