hi,

using an 8-bit grayscale .raw file is much efficient. you just load this as unsigned char. so you''re height map array now contains values between 0 to 255, then you just use this values for your terrain''s y vertices, and you won''t have to go thru all those texture loading/locking etc., stuffs,

Try DevIL for image loading. It loads many image file formats into memory (a nicely accessible array of chars depending on the image format).

ILuint img;
ilGenImages(1, &img);
ilBindImage(img);
ilLoadImage("myHeightMap.png");
char *imagedata = ilGetData();

Depending on ilGetInteger(IL_FORMAT) or something along the lines -- check out the manual, my code probably doesn''t work -- you can access each pixel using imagedata[blah].

You could of course make a seperate app to load an image and save it to a more convenient format. This has the advantage that you can do some expensive preprocessing such as lighting and such...

hi sixten,

you could use paintshop pro to generate .raw files and you don't need any helper or library to load an 8bit grayscale .raw file because, well it's already in 'raw' so loading it can be accomplished by this,

FILE *pFile = NULL;

pFile = fopen( rawfile, "rb" );
fread( HeightMapArray[999], 1, 999, pFile );
fclose(pFile);

and later, you can now use your heightmaparray to assign the heights to your y's vertices,

find out more at gametutorial's, they have a heightmap tutorial there,



[edited by - mickey on December 14, 2002 10:13:13 AM]