[Nyctaeus]

This is madness...

...very promising madness

[Dragon]

Woah, how did you do that? Is that FS? How does it run?

[Darius]

After LODs and optimisation I can get it to run pretty smoothly on my weak laptop once I turn off fxaa and shadows.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Hey, that actually looks like a city - irregular street plan and everything How did you get a procedural generator to do that?

[The Dagger]

That landscape is too damn good.

[torc]

More landscaping WIPs



Next on the to-do list:

• Make better building textures
• Learn how to make sexy curvy Asian-style skyscrapers.

Great work indeed....is this a skybox?

[General Battuta]

No.

[JCDNWarrior]

That's incredible, Darius. If I knew this was possible to be conceived, wow... All I can say is, keep up the great work, I look forward see more.

[Darius]

How did you get a procedural generator to do that?

It's not really procedurally generated (I don't know if FSO can support procedural generation...that would be awesome though). Just punched in some numbers on auto-greeble in Max until I got an effect I liked, then imported as a ship model.

[yuezhi]

How high up is that?

[Shivan Hunter]

auto-greeble in Max

I assume that's what FSF meant by procedural, as opposed to hand-placing all the buildings one by one.

Amazing work btw! I remember seeing Mars atmosphere screens related to BP... are you planning on using something like this for those missions? 'Cause that would be epic.

[Trivial Psychic]

How about having each building with its own detail box so you can cruise past them at close range and see far more detail close up on each building? 

[Shivan Hunter]

Great idea! I love 500MB model files that make FSO crash

(Remember, Esarai had an old Horizon model pimped out with massive amounts of subsystem model data - "only" a few million polys IIRC - and FSO had huge problems with it. Any noticeable amount of detail on the buildings, probably even in detail boxes, would run into the same bottlenecks.)

[Trivial Psychic]

... Even if there wasn't any model-based details between the levels, using only texture+normal mapping for the various subobject lods?

[Shivan Hunter]

...not sure what you mean here. If all the close-up detail is done via textures you wouldn't need (and wouldn't be able to use) detail boxes in the first place; those are for geometry.

You could theoretically have a duplicate building in the detail box, overlapping the normal one, with some higher-res textures applied to it, but this could be done in one of two ways:

The buildings in the detail box use a single (or a few) very high-res textures, replacing a single (or a few) lower-res textures on more distant buildings, in which case the lower-res textures are redundant as they could just be mipmaps of the larger ones, or

The buildings in the detail box use a bunch of different hi-res textures allowing for greater variety, in which case you run into engine issues for using too many textures (and see popping as the textures change from the distant to the various hi-res versions).

[Trivial Psychic]

Half that went over my head, so I guess I don't understand the LOD, detail box and texture system as well as I thought.

[Shivan Hunter]

Well the jist of it is that having hi-res textures replace low-res ones at close distances is already done by mipmapping, so so having a 4096x4096 texture and a similar 1024x1024 one is unnecessary - the 4096x4096 one probably already has the 1024x1024 data as a mipmap. (This is why we no longer need those texturea, textureb and texturec files at different sizes that retail had)

[Trivial Psychic]

The question is though, will the system switch to the higher detail texture view via mipmapping, on a per model basis, per submodel basis, or will it decide which parts of the model are closer to the player and switch up to the higher detail view for those closer portions?

If its on a per-model basis, then both near and far buildings will be displayed with equal detail and the detail box thing might be in order.  If its on a per-submodel basis, then the model could be redone so that each building (or perhaps block) is its own submodel so they will be up-detailed as the player gets closer.  If its done by player-proximity-to-a-section-of-hull, then there's no need for anything further.

[Shivan Hunter]

player-proximity-to-a-section-of-hull

Yes, I think this is it, if you mean the different sections on even the same polygon can have different mipmaps. The appropriate size is decided by the GPU on (IIRC) a per-pixel basis, so it's faster than any CPU-side submodel trickery would be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap

[Shivan Hunter]

This thread needs more pictures so I made a pic of Shivans looking ominous and ****