I'm personally working on Voxel terrain, got most of the opensim framework down, trying to find a place to upload to the code to though.
Using Minecraft's generation algorithms, with the author's permission. Fred Rookstown. On Fri, 2010-04-23 at 13:26 -0700, Dzonatas Sol wrote: > There does seem to be a collective feel that the terrain needs to > upgraded somehow. Even a Linden suggested maybe a way to override it if > the builder choses, like with sim sized mega prims. > > My first concern is LOD. The constant changes of LOD on the terrain make > the appearance the terrain unnatural and unstable. There are times where > we spend lots of time to get the terrain to look just perfectly aligned > with other objects nearby. When one decides to walk away 20m, 40m, 60m, > however, the perfect alignment becomes a prefect fashion statement for a > drunk bulldozer. The hard work undertaken to detail the alignment of the > terrain seems like a complete loss. > > As I've used other renders, lets pick on Call of Duty, the terrain is > pretty stable even at a distance. It has to be. The mere jump of LOD in > the terrain could mean a way to cheat in Deathmatch sniper rounds. You > know how snipers love to crawl around the terrain. That kind of > stableness doesn't happen when the drunk bulldozer decides to > rearrangement the landscape every frame you move. Call of Duty uses the > Source Engine, yet this isn't a 'lets all switch over to the Source > Engine' rant. It is a use-case that shows that even on old steampunk > video cards there still have the coal to burn up the pixels and display > a stable landscape. The use-case means, bottomline, it is possible. > > Maybe a baby-step solution is just to have an option to turn-off the LOD > for the current sim, and maybe nearby sims. The problem here, maybe, is > that the changes to add vertex limits would be affected by this. It > might not be all that simple like it was in the past without the vertex > limits. Therefore, there would need to be separate vertex limits: one > for the terrain and the rest for objects. > > Here is another use-case with a collada file: Lets say I have a collada > file that contains a very detailed structure of a volcano (terrain > only). The volcano is 1km wide. That crosses several 256m sims. There > are lava tunnels that lead inside. > > The suggested solution was to use a sim sized mega-prim. To do that with > scuplties would be hard for more than just looks. Sculpties need to > calculate all the phsyics, yet the collada file could have that already > detailed and compiled with the file. > > How do we do this with the stock viewer even if we used sculpties? The > stock viewer doesn't include a "sit on this object here like one sits on > land now anywhere" option. If we used a mega-prim, it would disabled the > ability to sit anywhere on the terrain. > > The other idea is to import a terrain, which is an available feature. > That doesn't allow us to have multiple height maps, like lava tubes. If > a lava tube crossed a sim to another, there would be a hole in the > terrain in one sim. There current terrain engine doesn't allow holes. > Multiple height maps would allow us to have holes in the terrain. The > physics detail of a scupltie bent to make that hole doesn't preform (and > I don't mean just frame optimization.. I mean like how a skirt clearly > either looks good or not when you sit down kind of 'preform'.) > > So, maybe the solution include that baby step.. to allow multiple height > map layers. A Lava tube could be done with three layers. One for the > bottom of the tunnel. One for the top. And one for the side of the > volcano above the tunnel. There would be needed an extra feature with > the height map to allow empty spaces, to allow where the tunnel opens > into the side of the volcano. > > So, before we even digress into the advantages of collada refineries, it > seems the first two baby steps would be to fix LOD and allow an > arbitrary number of terrain layers. > > I would like to see what others think about this. > > _______________________________________________ > Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev > Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
