Mickey, if you must do 3D terrain (in other words, if the tile engine approach will not work for you), then I have a couple of points to mention:

(1) You only need one camera and one SetTransform() call for the view matrix. Just keep the terrain in a fixed location and move the camera (the view matrix) with a single SetTransform() call.

(2) If you follow step (1), then, yes, you will have the problem of what to do when the camera reaches the edge of the terrain (which you mentioned). Solve this problem by keeping several smaller "patches" of terrain that you rotate like a conveyer belt. When one patch goes offscreen, rotate it around to the front of the line. I do this in my own game, and it works well.

Okay, so how do you achieve this patch rotation? Well, either you can keep a dynamic vertex buffer and update the positions of a patch's vertices each time it gets rotated (rendering all patches with a single DrawIndexedPrimitive() call), or you can use a static buffer, assign each patch its own world matrix and render the patches with separate DrawIndexedPrimitive() calls.

I can't say which approach would work better for you because I don't know the details of your game.

Hope this helps.
--Hoozit (who likes parentheses).

(edits: clarity)
----------------------
Check out my game demo and resume at
www.fivestory.com/projects/game.

[edited by - HoozitWhatzit on December 4, 2002 4:48:49 PM]

[edited by - HoozitWhatzit on December 4, 2002 4:49:53 PM]

well, it's not really sort of fixed perspective, i'm planning to have 3 different views, each with a slight tilt since the game is already 3d i might as well take advantage of it,

HoozitWhatZit: hiya, do you mean by patches is, the last few lines/parts of the terrain's bottom vertices? then transfer it to the front right?

i don't understand why you guys keep on pushing 'moving the camera instead', if i move the camera, everything would scroll! even the player's ship and other objects which shouldn't be scrolling, unless like i said, my terrain has it's own camera and my other objecvts another one,

is this what thona is suggesting?

i don't know if posting this
screenshot would help, anyway, that's what i want to scroll, the 'terrain',

thanks guys for trying to help me out,


[edited by - mickey on December 4, 2002 10:52:34 PM]

Mickey,

No, actually, I meant a patch to be a rectangular section of floor terrain, m vertices wide by n vertices tall. Rotate this entire section from back to front. Judging by your screenshot, you probably want infinite terrain to keep appearing in front of the player ship, right?

I agree with everyone about the camera. It''ll be the easiest situation for you if you just have the camera track the player ship''s movement. That way, you won''t have to update the enemy ships'' world matrices to account for the player''s movement.

Which sounds easiest to you: updating one matrix per frame or updating 10?

--Hoozit.

----------------------
Check out my game demo and resume at
www.fivestory.com/projects/game.

There is actually no reason not to have the player move forward, too :-)

With just the 8 decimals you get as precision from a float you can encode, you get an awfull large space :-)

Regards

Thomas Tomiczek
THONA Consulting Ltd.
(Microsoft MVP C#/.NET)