Dark_au Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 Gday, Is there any intention of opening up a download area for end user content?. With the info about scenario building released there will hopefully be more scenarios and addons available soon. Also I've written a quick fractal landscape generator for drop team which I'm willing to share but have no where to upload it. I've got it working doing basic ground shading for the big terrain texture file ( no shadows as such yet until I can work out how to do these). It may be an alternative to terragen for those too poor or too tight to buy the full version of it. After reading the scenario creation doc I'm tempted to put together a quick GUI scenario "assembler / editor" if anyone is interested in assisting please let me know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ClaytoniousRex Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 Outstanding! We at TBG will be happy to lend a hand here and there if you need it. We can also host items that you want to share on our web server (you will just need to email us and arrange to FTP the file(s) up to a server and we will deploy them for you). I'm sure there are some programmer-types on this forum who would also be willing to help... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tankibanki Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 Did I miss something? Has the scenario building info been released, yet? Or are you fantasizing about the time after release of that info? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ClaytoniousRex Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 It's in the new modding forum, Tanki. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toby Haynes Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 Originally posted by Dark_au: Also I've written a quick fractal landscape generator for drop team which I'm willing to share but have no where to upload it. I've got it working doing basic ground shading for the big terrain texture file ( no shadows as such yet until I can work out how to do these). It may be an alternative to terragen for those too poor or too tight to buy the full version of it. Before you dump vast resources into a new project, let me point you at two projects I've used in the past to create heightmaps for other games (such as scorched3d at www.scorched3d.co.uk). The first (and my normal choice) is GeoMorph - available from http://geomorph.sourceforge.net/. This allows generation and modification of landscapes by eroding, weathering and other distortions. It's pretty effective and has worked well for me. It's fairly easy to get up and running on a Linux box - whether there is a Windows version is another matter. It has some nice features such as dune modelling (for those desert maps) and the ability to superimpose two heightmaps together (useful for adding rockier outcrops to a desert map, for example). The second is Terraform ( http://terraform.sourceforge.net/ ). It supports many terrain generation routines, some editing and manipulation. Again this is fairly easy to get running on Linux and a Mac OS X version is apparently available (but I've not tried it). Cheers, Toby Haynes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark_au Posted June 28, 2006 Author Share Posted June 28, 2006 Believe me I haven't dumped vast resourses into it. Its based on a couple of heightmap generators I've written before but i've changed some bits to make it produce .raw files for Dropteam. One reason I prefer to do these sort of things myself is that then I know how they work and can tweak them. Its taken me only a few hours to get it (nearly) finished... apart from actual cast shadows. not really sure how to do those efficiently. I've got some ideas but they seem quite long-winded. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ClaytoniousRex Posted June 28, 2006 Share Posted June 28, 2006 Whenever you're ready to share it, Dark, drop me an email and will give you an FTP account to upload to, then I'll make it available to the community. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toby Haynes Posted June 28, 2006 Share Posted June 28, 2006 Originally posted by Dark_au: Believe me I haven't dumped vast resourses into it. Its based on a couple of heightmap generators I've written before but i've changed some bits to make it produce .raw files for Dropteam. One reason I prefer to do these sort of things myself is that then I know how they work and can tweak them. Its taken me only a few hours to get it (nearly) finished... apart from actual cast shadows. not really sure how to do those efficiently. I've got some ideas but they seem quite long-winded. I know the feeling. I've been working on a new weathering system for landscapes to produce realistic water-eroded features (such as rivers with interlocking spurs, meanders, etc) for the last couple of months or so, a few minutes of work here and there. I've been disappointed with the standard gradient-based systems I've used so far and wanted something a little more interesting. A lot of the weathering routines out there end up favouring the eight compass directions - if you start with a hemispherical hill, you end up with an octagonal weathered hill. Actually, that's an artifact you can see in the Dropteam maps. It's slowly starting to take shape. The heightfield routines have been tweaked and I'm happy with them. Sub-pixel positioning is in. The particle dynamics that will drive all this are taking shape. The basic physics are in place. Erosion brushes are about to be implemented and that should give me the first real results. Eventually, it should be able to write out the weathered landscape, areas of erosion and areas of deposition as three separate images. Given those three, it might be possible to come up with some smart vegetation placement (i.e. most vegetation in areas of deposition, least in areas of erosion). There are ideas such as variable hardness of the surface, to allow simulation of real rock strata. Mapping the areas of most particle flow to provide for river placement might be possible. Some simple tweaking might allow for methods to produce realistic snow accumulation. Still - it's probably still a month away from seeing the light. I would be interested to see any shadow casting routines you have for the landscapes. I envisage this weathering library eventually being hooked up to GeoMorph if it works well enough but it could easily be tweaked to weather any input image and dump out a DropTeam map, complete with vegetation information. A little tweaking might then give a basic scenario. Now - do I play online to night or code some more ....? hmmmm.... Cheers, Toby Haynes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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