Is it not what I thought?

Hi guys,

I am putting together an ODN development environment. I was told that Paging Landscape SceneManager would work with ODN. And from some of what I've read, PLSM seemed like a must have.

So I went and downloaded the Binary Demo and got it to run. Well I guess I did not see what I expected. I was able to move through the terrain and drop spheres and make deformations. And it looked pretty nice. But I guess I was expecting to move toward the border of a section and have the next section paged in and attached seamlessly (before it became visible) and preferable without an animated pause. I read much about the features of PLMS and some of the features seem to indicate what I expect, however, they did not seem to be the top-most features. Am I completely missing the boat on what PLMS is, or at least what the main idea is?

It would seem to me that a demo that that placed a first player controlled entity on top of the terrain that could move smoothly between pages would be a good demo. Of course it should contain a scene not just terrain.

Tried to find some documentation on sourceforge without any luck.

I'm responding as a user of PLM2, tuan is the programmer, so this isn't official

Check the wiki for documentation.

Regarding paging, the demos should clearly show paging terrain. If it isn't completely smooth at the moment when pages are loaded, it should eventually be. I've worked with background loading resoures working in Ogre so eventually I'll work with Tuan to ensure the terrain heightmaps and textures are loaded in a background thread.

Demos are nice to have, but so are features. We're working on features

Thanks for the fast response.

Maybe the question is, "Do you define paging as I did above?" In the demo I have (http://tuan.kuranes.free.fr/Ogre.html), it is not that things are not smooth. It is that no paging happens. As I approach the border of the terrain, nothing happens. I go right past the edge and nothing happens. Is that not what paging is?

In that demo, what you are seeing is the current extent of the world. Paging is going on within those bounds. It is easiest to see if you fly up high and look down at it. In the picture below you can see inside the red box was the corner of the landscape, but some of the pages have gone away.

lopemanc: Demo is developper oriented. So no shiny features.

-Use grand_canyon terrain, which is the pslm2 real paging test, Make camera stick to terrain 'B' key, then test Paging without using shift or/and Ctrl key, to test it at real speed, it should take you hour between reaching a corner.
-Others terrain are intended other tests (16bits terrain, real-time shadowing, whole landscape loading at start, deformation save/load, terrain painting, etc...). It's hard to re-find tested/deformed/painted spot things on a 10km2 terrain.
- Enable Fog, to hide tile show/hide and paging as it's not enabled by default so that you actually see paging...

But I'm working on better demo, with the aim at releasing multiple demos showing multiple faces of plsm2. (and they are several, which actually bloats the actual single demo...)

All idea/submission welcome.

for now I tought of :
- basic paging
- terrain + minimap + object placement (rts style)
- occlusion culling scene (I need building/house models)
- vegetation
- water + isles
- ...

Very helpful, thank you. And very educational. I think I see what you mean about applying fog. In the real world the atomosphere is never completley clear. This in conjunction with the curvature of the planet, stop mountains from popping into view. I assume curavature is not an option, so we could make this more realistic by the application of a very light fog.

Since your saying that you are working on a better demo with sceenes, I take that PLMS an already handle these sceenes.

Looks great and sounds great. Keep up the great work. It is very impresive and apprciated.