Project OgrePlanet - Slowly coming back to life

A place for users of OGRE to discuss ideas and experiences of utilitising OGRE in their games / demos / applications.
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Lee04
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Whats bug is that Hexidave that you couldn't reproduce?

Post by Lee04 »

Whats bug is that Hexidave that you couldn't reproduce?

Something on some other computer system that you don't have access to or some bug on your machine if so what?
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draxd2007
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Ogre 1.5 CVS

Post by draxd2007 »

Did anyone made it work with Ogre 1.5 CVS , I manage to compile it but there`s no planet .It works fine with 1.4.
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Grom
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Post by Grom »

is this project still being developed? I downloaded/compiled it with doubles, I was hoping for a full planet :lol:

drax press 'L'
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HexiDave
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Post by HexiDave »

I'm currently rebuilding the entire system from the ground up - I have contract work on the side (plus 'real life' stuff). I'm at the bed-rock level and it'll remain that way until I'm satisfied it's not going to be a massive failure like some of my other plans. Basically, I'm just laying out test after test of systems and sub-systems - I've got a lot of perfectly functioning things (quad-trees that can attach to other quad-trees in any configuration with proper neighborhoods, large world coordinate systems, etc), but I need to make it all function together.

This is essentially going to replace SimplePagedTerrain as I'll have multiple basic world configurations to work with (flat, spherical, toroidal, etc). As I've noted in the SPT thread, I promise to show progress when I get something to show that isn't just numbers in a DOS window.

It's been a quite a long time since I originally started working with terrain and 3D programming - OgrePlanet was basically my way of getting into C++ in a big way, and it was a colossal failure/success. On one hand I created a system that could handle procedural planet generation and on another I completely missed the point of how STL works... So, in the end, OgrePlanet V1 sucked and is dead.

OgrePlanet V2 is going to knock your socks off.
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Alexander
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Post by Alexander »

You mentioned texturing earlier, so I thought you'd like to read this:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums ... ?jn=263350
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HexiDave
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Post by HexiDave »

That is a good find - I generally peek at his dev journal now and again as I am doing things similarly to the way he's doing them, but I try to solve the problems on my own as I'll understand it better in the long run if I struggle with it. I had come across that problem some time back and nearly got as far as he did with it, so it's good to see there IS a solution to that.
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Grom
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Post by Grom »

what's the first step to building a planetary system... the enormous coordinate system, or a specific terrain technique?
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HexiDave
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Post by HexiDave »

Floating point precision runs out fairly fast for a good sized planet, but overall the large-space coordinate system is simple. I'm pretty sure I have a decent explanation of Floating-Origin use over in the SPT thread in Showcase. There are other things, like using 64-bit integers to do all the math until it's time to calculate geometry, then switch over to doubles, then cast them to floats when it's time to pack them into buffers.

My hardest issue so far has been getting the geometry and the management systems to cooperate in an elegant fashion. I've gone through a few dozen versions and I keep thinking up better ways to do it, but some of the earliest were very hacky. I use a quad-tree that handles neighborhoods and the geometry uses GeoMipMapping, so the quad-tree has to be extra smart in the case of a planet, as you've got 6 quad-trees hooked together (the geometry creation phase takes planar coordinates and turns them into 3D coordinates that match the curvature of a sphere). The biggest problem arrives when you're splitting/unsplitting the tree nodes - you don't want to destroy geometry as soon as you split as you need new geometry to replace the old (i.e. one chunk of terrain splits into 4 new ones), so you need to make sure things stay in place without fouling up the quad-tree split/unsplit mechanics and GeoMipMap stitching.

A lot of the simple tricks that make 2D terrains so nice just do not translate to planets, so you have to think of a lot of new tricks and get creative with making the most with what you've got.
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HexiDave
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Post by HexiDave »

Just to prove I'm not always slacking, here's some shots showing GeoMipMapping with normals on a full 3D spherical world:

(Note, this is in Debug mode)
Image
Image
Image

I locked the updating so you could see what it looks like zoomed out. The normals are per-vertex there, but I've done it with textures as well - I've got a better way of handling that (although, I'll have per-vertex options as well). You can see that I'm getting closer to the surface and there's still a lot of geometry detail that's very close together.

Texturing and tangent-space normal mapping works as well, but I didn't have any good screenshots of that yet.

You can't see it there, but the other 5 faces of the cube I use are there and are acting properly with the stitching. I'll show that off once I get the quad-tree edge heightmap synthesis fixed (the edge data I store in the heightmap to avoid sampling neighboring heightmaps means that the very edge of the quad-tree screws the edge data up - simple fix, just time-consuming).
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trilobite
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Post by trilobite »

I've said it before and I'll say it again... "I want it!"
Kezryk
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Libnoise

Post by Kezryk »

Couldnt you use libnoise to generate the planetary Heightmap, then morph it into its final shape. Then use the color map it makes to texture the world???
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tdev
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Post by tdev »

do you intend to release the code under LGPL?
can we help you with this plugin anyhow (coding, testing, ...)?
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Sovaka
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Post by Sovaka »

Aww, the pictures are AWOL now :(

How goes the progress?
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Re: Project OgrePlanet - Slowly coming back to life

Post by dudeabot »

where i can download this?

links are broken :(
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Lord Alexion
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Re: Project OgrePlanet - Slowly coming back to life

Post by Lord Alexion »

Just bumping to check if the project is still alive...

sorry if I'm being inconvenient ^^o
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Re: Project OgrePlanet - Slowly coming back to life

Post by jacmoe »

It's been well over a year since HexiDave posted anything new, so I guess the project slowly went back to hiatus.
In plain English: not alive.
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Sovaka
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Re: Project OgrePlanet - Slowly coming back to life

Post by Sovaka »

I'm not so sure :)

I have done some searching and it appears HexiDave has uploaded some recent videos to YouTube :)
He is still working on it to be sure and if he is still discussing it, he's just not discussing it here.


How goes the hard slug HexiDave?
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