ROAM Planet rendering

A place to show off your latest screenshots and for people to comment on them. Only start a new thread here if you have some nice images to show off!
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ultramedia
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

heh heh heh... well you know what they say... Roam wasn't built in a day...
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Guys,

HAPPY NEW YEAR and all that jazz.

I've been playing around with the terrain mesh management again (seems I'm a bit obsessed with this little ditty, ROAM I mean) and wanted to see how I could improve the mesh generation pipeline again, plus really get the instance page boundaries working better and faster for final population of flora etc.
Page zones and distance views
Page zones and distance views
If you look at the shot above, you'll see that there is a parameter named "PageZones" the number after it is the number count of how many pages are in the queue for processing, the next one down is the maximum diameter of the largest page zone, the next is the minimum and the next is the farthest distance from the player ( 167,210 meters or 167.2 km) Now all these zones aren't in view, they surround the player like a great big pancake, and the player is standing in the middle, also, these zones are all above the waters' surface (no need to worry about what's under there, until we can see it, I will bring them in when we get close enough the the waters' edge / surface and may go under).

I'm working on a way I can get the flora intelligently and consistently placed on the surface of the terrain, that is fast enough as to not use too many cycles of the CPU, and also a dynamic batching that doesn't work in too many small batches being fed to the GPU, so I am trying to come up with a way to intelligently build a blanket batch for distant mountains, and then go more conventional closer up, using a sort of sliding scale as to how many pages get fed into the blanket batcher based on importance and distance from the player. It's an interesting project to work on, because all this is procedural, and not in some kind of file that makes it easy to do, Plus I don't want too much shifting of distant forest clusters (what I mean by that is, When the topology changes as you get closer to a mountain say, the procedural placement routines will find more places to add and remove trees from in the distance) because the distances we see here are quite substantial, especially on approach from high orbit, so I will need to proceduraly generate forest texture overlay data I think, and use it as a decal layer (that's sort of what I mean by the term "blanket batch").

Anyway, that's where I'm at at the moment, still nutting out this stuff, "AND LOVING IT !!!"

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day again guys,

Here are a couple of shots of the coastlines now ....
A rocky shoreline.
A rocky shoreline.
I really am starting to like the way the texture look up is working now, The only problem I can see, is my shader not doing it justice, but I'm working on it.
A closer look at the waves on the shorelines.
A closer look at the waves on the shorelines.
Here you can see the waves that roll in in sets of three constantly in this simulation, they are starting to take better shape and form, but I still have an issue on the very edge where the water meets the terrain, a silly transparency issue. What I need here is a bezier particle emitter I think, to give the illusion of foam and spray, plus splash on the rocks based on angle of attack of the wave face and the rock face it is hitting, will make it all look more convincing I feel.

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day again guys,

Here are a couple of shots of the clouds at different times of the day ...
This is at around 11.00 am
This is at around 11.00 am
This is at around 7:00 pm or Dusk.
This is at around 7:00 pm or Dusk.
These aren't the final clouds for this simulation, but I was just looking around (WASTING TIME AGAIN !!!!) and noticed these shots, and thought they where quite nice.
The times in the comments are based on the time zone where the player is on the surface of the planet, another little thing I will have to keep track of for players on the surface and economies populating the planet in question (have a think about that little nightmare, for an MMO, I do have a solution in place though).

Anyway, I just thought there was a nice play on light going on here. As the clouds are really only made up of a white texture with transparency, and a perlin normal map, all the color is derived from lighting calculations, and no skybox.

Another thing I just noticed too, if you look at the frame rates of the terrain shots from previous pics I just posted, and look at the frame rates of the pics in this post, looks like I really have to look at the expense of my terrain shader, as you can see, there is quite a hit when there is more terrain in view.+

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

Re the ocean shader, looks good, have a couple of suggestions:
- scale down the ridged fractal?
- increase the specular hardness (a lot) maybe with some sort of fresnel shader?
- add in fractal island shaped color variations under the water (i.e. seaweed) and blur the edges slightly
http://www.genkin.org/cgi-bin/photo.pl/ ... apost-0018
- use a white to blue gradient for the ocean side of the wave crests to insinuate depth (see below)
Image
Image

I'm pretty confident you've already thought of all this and much more though ;)
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Utramedia,

HMM! Great Australian Byte Coastlines Hay !!!

That'll be a job for the Layered overhang stuff I'm working on mate, and yes I know my water shader is crap, but I really haven't done anything to it for ages now, I was just toying with wave formation and structure the other day. Those photos you posted are a great source of inspiration for me, and I will en devour to achieve that look, just give me a little time, I'm still learning allot about these fandangled shader thingies. In my prime, all I had to work with was a pointer to a frame buffer for VGA ram, and that was it, OH I did work with the Motorola CPUS and the Blitter chip on the Commodore Amiga PC back then, that was fun. But these video cards now days are excellent to toy around with.

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Mind Calamity »

Wow, I haven't visited this thread for almost a month, and that is a huge improvement!

Great job, Alex, keep up the good work, that's just stunning! :shock:
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Brainshack »

Is there any chance that you will be releasing ROAM to the publics?

I read something in the beginning of the topic but didnt want to work through 23 pages to find the answer to that short question^^
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Brainshack,
Brainshack wrote:Is there any chance that you will be releasing ROAM to the publics?
Simple answer : YES !

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by aguru »

Hey Alex,

love your progress as usual! :) I do have a request, though. Could you post a screenshot close to the ground, maybe on the beach with some kind of scale reference model, a person, a tree or something? I find it very difficult to judge the scale and level of detail of the whole thing. To be honest, I'm a bit concerned about the refinement of the terrain from a close-up perspective. Not sure if its just the general level of detail, the polycount up close, the shaders -- or if I'm even just completely wrong, but somehow I have a feeling that with the current settings, walking really close to the terrain might look a bit rough.

I'd love to hear your thoughs on this !! :)
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day aguru,

This is a few pics of the older version, which is using the same scales as the newest version, but this one has the trees on the island I showed on a previous post.
A wide angle shot of where the dwelling is on the Island.
A wide angle shot of where the dwelling is on the Island.
This is an overall view of the dwelling on the Islands' surface.
A dwelling on an Island.
A dwelling on an Island.
A closer view standing on the ground near the dwelling.
Take note of the size of the ship on the landing pad, and then look at the next picture, I am sitting in the pilots' chair, that way you will get an idea of the scale of the dwelling
Inside the ship on the landing pad of the dwelling.
Inside the ship on the landing pad of the dwelling.
And this is a pic from inside the cockpit of the Phoenix ship that is on the landing pad of the dwelling.

As you can see, the scales are ok, and the terrain mesh is quite ok (not too rough at all), it's all at a scale where you can run around on the flat to the tops of the mountains without it looking stupid.
The newest terrain will be even nicer, I'm making mods that will enable me to grass it, as well as put trees and stuff down more intelligently.

Hope this helps

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by aguru »

Hey Alex, thanks for the screens. They are indeed reassuring. I guess the rest is up to the textures/shaders and maybe some displacement to make the detail up close more refined. I'm thinking http://www.outerra.com/procedural/demo2.html maybe?

Two more shots that might give you some ideas: http://outerra.com/shots/k277.jpg and http://outerra.com/shots/k262.jpg

Hope I'm not too much of a pain.. Have fun coding!! :)

Btw, are there any plans to allow for the procedural terrain generation to be based on a lower resolution "layout" heightmap? So as not to base one small area on a high resolution heightmap but rather a whole "island" on a low-resolution guiding heightmap? I would think that this scenario could be very interesting for some game developers.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day aguru,
aguru wrote:are there any plans to allow for the procedural terrain generation to be based on a lower resolution "layout" heightmap?
That's exactly what I'm doing, It handles (the current) low resolution Procedural mesh and Low Resolution artist driven areas, these areas can be Islands if you want, or pieces of the landmass that is already there, and modified by an artist maybe. Then I will augment this current low resolution mesh with a proceduraly (rule based) driven tessellation algorithm , something similar to what outerra are doing. Now I can use just the ROAM to do this mesh tessellation if I want, but it is really too slow to go down that far in real time, now I have it going down to a reasonable resolution now, but to get that finer detail in, well, I might have to resort to more mesh data being uploaded to the GPU from the CPU, otherwise I could finalize my silly GPU tessellation routine, but then I will run the risk of making this thing GPU shader bound, or I could go the way of others, and load up the ram with shit loads of data. I want to see if I can do it different and use a minimal amount of data, I'm currently at around 30 MB for the total Mesh cache data, including the ROAM Tree.

As it stands at the moment, I could run this on a phone, I don't know how well it would do, but theoretically it is possible.
aguru wrote:Hope I'm not too much of a pain.
Never, I welcome the questions.

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Brainshack »

DavlexDesign wrote:G'day Brainshack,
Brainshack wrote:Is there any chance that you will be releasing ROAM to the publics?
Simple answer : YES !

Alex
And do you have any ETA?^^
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Brainshack wrote: And do you have any ETA?^^
When its done ^_^
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Brainshack »

Sovaka wrote:
Brainshack wrote: And do you have any ETA?^^
When its done ^_^
You guys work for Blizzard? :P
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

Brainshack wrote: You guys work for Blizzard? :P
No but when you are this early in game development... You simply can't project any kind of release date.

We are still working on the core engine (Flora, Atmosphere and Water Shaders)
Our terrain engine is pretty much complete, just a few adjustments needs to be made to the shader and some tweaks to the our skin layer.

I'd like to say we are a couple months away from a "feature complete" engine core. But it is hard to say and I can't account for life's unexpected pleasures.
But just because the core engine is "feature complete", does not mean it is ready for release.

Our main goal at the moment is to get the engine to a nice shiny pretty state, so that we can hit up our Government for a grant.
A grant that will see Alex and I work on the engine full time.
Possibly even get some more people on board to help with it.

We are working on getting a couple new videos out to explain whats going on and why it's taking so long.
But don't expect that until all the above mentioned features are in.

Until that time, Alex or I may post the occasional picture.

"Good things come to those who wait, but only things left behind by those who hustle." — Abraham Lincoln
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Brainshack »

Nicely wirtten. So I will train my self in patience^^
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Zonder »

Brainshack wrote:Nicely wirtten. So I will train my self in patience^^
yeah were all itching to have a fly around the planet to see what we can find :)
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't...
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Sovaka »

I was ROAMing around the planet today and came across this little ripper of a shot.

Now keep in mind, we haven't put in our new Water and Atmo shader's yet.
Good reference to come back to.
Shot from low orbit.<br />Just about to leave the atmosphere.
Shot from low orbit.
Just about to leave the atmosphere.
Image size: 1280x720

Expect the planet to look a lot more beautiful than this in the coming weeks.

And a rehash on my system specs;
Intel i7 920 2.8Ghz Quad Core
6GB DDR3 Ram
nVidia GTX 460 :roll:

I do have two of these cards in SLI, but SLI ISN'T enabled on my system nor is it setup in our engine.
The second card is dedicated for PhysX, which hasn't been plugged in yet.

.: EDIT :.
Had to add another shot :lol:
Image size: 1680 x 1050<br />'What's this... Another planet?'
Image size: 1680 x 1050
'What's this... Another planet?'
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

Hey Alex,

You would've had a laugh, on the weekend I tried to figure out how to do basic interactive subdivision of an icosahedron, damn near burned my brain out (and no smooth icosahedron to show for it)...
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

ultramedia wrote:You would've had a laugh, on the weekend I tried to figure out how to do basic interactive subdivision of an icosahedron, damn near burned my brain out (and no smooth icosahedron to show for it)...
I would never laugh at you (to your face) when you tackle something like this, and the burning of the brain ... WELCOME TO THE CLUB !!!.

Keep at it mate, It's always tough until you get your head around it.

You just have to realize, to split an icosahedron, you have to split the three edges for every face, so you end up with four faces after the split. The draw back is that to lod the mesh so you have different resolution triangles over distance on one piece of geometry, you have to change the triangles at the transition to mid point splitting to remove T junctions, or go with a degenerate triangle along one of the edges, too many operations, and too much checking.

I went with Midpoint displacement splitting, because most of the time, I really only need to perform 1 split per triangle, but it is a self calling routine, so if the split creates a T junction it calls itself to split the other face first, which then returns with the other face already split, hence removing the possibility of T junctions. Plus I have no problems with muti resolution meshes in the one piece of geometry (as you can see in those pics of the coastlines and stuff).

Have fun,

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by LordBaal »

Sovaka wrote:
Brainshack wrote: You guys work for Blizzard? :P
No but when you are this early in game development... You simply can't project any kind of release date.

We are still working on the core engine (Flora, Atmosphere and Water Shaders)
Our terrain engine is pretty much complete, just a few adjustments needs to be made to the shader and some tweaks to the our skin layer.

I'd like to say we are a couple months away from a "feature complete" engine core. But it is hard to say and I can't account for life's unexpected pleasures.
But just because the core engine is "feature complete", does not mean it is ready for release.

Our main goal at the moment is to get the engine to a nice shiny pretty state, so that we can hit up our Government for a grant.
A grant that will see Alex and I work on the engine full time.
Possibly even get some more people on board to help with it.

We are working on getting a couple new videos out to explain whats going on and why it's taking so long.
But don't expect that until all the above mentioned features are in.

Until that time, Alex or I may post the occasional picture.

"Good things come to those who wait, but only things left behind by those who hustle." — Abraham Lincoln
O God I hope you guys get sponsored! And I understand the long road ahead of you, but in the end this will be the most important contribution to gaming ever made by anyone. What this gentelmens are doing here (for you, the ocasional reader to understand) is developing a game engine that builds not only a map, city or planet, but a whole universe for you, freeing you up to focus only on developing a game within that universe, with a fully proceduraly generated universe (a process that you can control and shape by the way) for you, with all it's laws (gravity, ligthing), planets, stars and whatnot! In comparisong imagine how hard would be to make a statue if you have to make the rock out of thin air first! Alex and Sovaka are making not only the rock, but making a whole infinet montain of blocks, and also giving us (in the future) the tools to shape those rocks at or will and desire! This is marvellous as it allows flexibility on your games making a natural background for you to modify and create upon at your will.

Again, I hope you get the grant, since I know you will make a huge, long term impact on game develpment. Kudos to you both and anyone participing on the proyect. (Sorry for the ortographic mistakes, my browser dictionary has been unistalled by unkown, evil forces..)

I stand correct! :D
Last edited by LordBaal on Thu Jan 19, 2012 1:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,
LordBaal wrote: in the end this will be the most important contribution to gaming ever made by anyone
WOW! that's a pretty amazing statement LordBaal, I didn't realize that you thought so highly of this project, thank you very much, makes me want to devote a whole lot more time to this thing.I hope we don't disappoint you guys.
LordBaal wrote:developing a game engine that builds not only a map, city or planet, but a whole universe for you, freeing you up to focus only on developing a game within that universe, with a fully pregenerated universe for you, with all it's laws (gravity, ligthing), planets, stars and whatnot!
That statement just about nails the objective of this project right on the head, with only one correction ..."fully pregenerated universe"... more like ..."fully predictable/controllable proceduraly generated universe".
Of course there will be pregenerated areas on planet surfaces, asteroid surfaces, and space stations etc, which will be created by artists, but predominantly, it will all be procedural in nature.
At the moment all you have to do is give the planet...

1. a radius
2. flag to say liquid is on the planet, and with that an atmosphere is created for you (I will make it so that based on the composition of the liquid, the atmosphere parameters will adjust accordingly).
3. Offset for the liquid from the radius stipulated, for allowing maximum high tides at the equator.
4. Offset for the maximum height/depth of terrain features.
5. a seed, which controls the terrain generation and the rest of the stuff (at the moment) is all generated from that.
6. a Target Page resolution for each of the 6 faces of the unit cube sphere.
7. a Target resolution for the page mesh (number of splits allowable per page on the surface.

We still have allot of hard coded parameters in there for testing and stuff, which we will en-devour to make easier to understand and GUI adjustable, there are some that rely on other parameters to get a final value, so what we think will need to happen, is that allot of these parameters will be internally and intelligently calculated for you, maybe with an option to allow manual adjustment, if you really want to dig deep into the workings and control the generation yourself.
We are working on a node based interface for allot of this, to use in engine (or maybe an external tool).
One thing we will do, is setup some base primitive parameters for the fractal algorithms to use to generate the terrain topology (Moon scapes, Earth scapes, Asteroid scapes, etc ...), that will make the procedural solar systems allot easier to work with for starters.

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by palaslet »

Alex,

All the images you post seems to be taken from the "temperate" part of the planet?

Is there any climate zones? or is this a "wet" planet? Would be cool to see some sand dunes in the desert and some ice mountains in the arctic sea. :)

Great work btw!
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