Terrain should be

General Discussion
1

I’m wondering that terrain should be from height map or from model? Anyone give me an advice !

2

It really depends on your needs, the scale of the world, and the type of game you are making.

3

The height map file used with GeoMipTerrain will give Level of Detail methods to handle larger terrains that will dynamically adjust the numbers of polys used near the camera to out at a distance. This helps with load time and can help with frame rates when moving across the larger terrain. However if your terrain is smaller (512x512) is okay I think to put into a BAM model file; should load fast and have good frame rate. GeoMipTerrain also has a “bruteforce” method that tells it to build the terrain to its full resolution, so you can still use it for smaller terrains that might not benefit from the LOD processing.

4

I want to “dynamic loading map”, my map will be very huge. I only need load a part of map which is bigger than my sight (out of far plane of camera). When I’m moving, I calculate distance to another part of map (with some magic number), then load them when need. And free a part which loaded but out of my sight. GeoMipTerrain can do that ?

5

Hi

What GeoMipTerrain does is within one terrain. You can set it up to use more polygons close to the camera and as distance from the camera increases the number of polygons can decrease.

I’m doing what you are wanting to do, I also load a set of terrain areas ( but big ones 1024X1024) and use the GeoMipTerrain internal LOD feature as will as my own loading in up coming terrain and “unloading” the ones from behind. I don’t actually unload any terrain, I reuse the same memory by calling a modified GeoMipTerrain Class to reset the image height file. My version of GeoMipTerrain only changes the Z-Value (height) of the Terrain when the image file is of the same size and doesn’t rebuild the terrain, so it swaps terrain files faster. My terrains are set up in as a 3X3 each 1024X1024 with image files the same size. I have my own terrain manager class that handles the swapping of terrain areas, that is the part that GeoMipTerrain doesn’t do.

6

Thanks a lot, tah!