Ahoy,
Kabutor and I made some tests with the PagingLandScape plugin from
the Ogre addons section. It's basically an extension to the currently
used TerrainSceneManager plugin and features two main extensions that
are important for Freebooters:
- Terrain paging, i.e. no static paging of terrain tiles is performed,
but instead adjacent tiles are loaded dynamically, which allows a
continuous world
- Terrain splatting, which allows to use different textures for different
terrain regions, e.g. sands beaches for the shore and snow for mountain
crests
Both features seemed to work fine (with a few hiccups), but the performance
is currently not satisfying, with PLSM it's only about a third of the
frame rate of TSM. Even my Athlon 1700 with a Radeon 9200 (the fastest
graphic card with open source drivers) only manages 25-30 fps, which is
a total knockout for older graphic cards.
PLSM includes a very nice tool called MapSplitter, that is used to split
a very large map into several tiny tile maplets. So I'd propose that
I modify our current static tiling implementation to use the scheme
generated to MapSplitter. This way we can split the large Caribbean Map
into separete tiles and switch over to PLSM once the performance problems
have been fixed, without further hassles.
We won't have terrain splatting, though, but we can still improve the
scenes by including more static scene meshes like beaches, reefs, caves
and such into our scenes.
Suggestions, comments?
Cheers,
Moritz
