world of warcraft terrain
Author
hey all. i just had the chance to play world of warcraft by participating in the stress test. i was just wondering if anyone has an idea on their implementation of the terrain in the game. thanks!
I have no idea, but now you have tested it, maybe you can interpret what did Shane Dabiri mean when he said:
From the screenshots I've seen, it "looks" pretty much like Warcraft III.
Quote:"Our terrain is streaming," ... "which means it's continuous terrain, there is no loading whatsoever during gameplay. There will be times when you're on one end of the map and you have to get to the other side.
From the screenshots I've seen, it "looks" pretty much like Warcraft III.
Hmmm to me, the geometry looked like farcry. That means a heightmap, when they need a cave, they cut it out of the heightmap and insert a custom model. As for the textures, they use quite high res tiled textures and splat them on the terrain. ( NO detail texturing ). Additionally it looked like they changed mipmapping so it occurs very late, and it looked like the game automatically enabled anisotropic filtering / fsaa.
Author
thanks for the replies. i was hoping someone would know the LOD method used since, during the stress test, i noticed popping.
a while back i worked on a warcraft 3 map viewer and now i'm interested in something more...vast. you can view a pic of my viewer at http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~btang/ss_night_mdx.jpg
it's pretty unoptimized so easy on the criticism =)
a while back i worked on a warcraft 3 map viewer and now i'm interested in something more...vast. you can view a pic of my viewer at http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~btang/ss_night_mdx.jpg
it's pretty unoptimized so easy on the criticism =)
By streaming terrain I think he means that the terrain streams chunks of data as you get close to them and dumps old chunks as you move away from them. This method could make a seemless world with no 'perceivable' load times (like Dungeon Siege, just terrain chunks instead of meshes). When I played as the undead race I noticed a large gate to the NE that resembled a "donut" style area portal.
It looks like this engine is based off of the Warcraft III engine. I was playing in full detail and wouldn't say the textures were very detailed (but i'm not saying they were poorly painted either, if the artist is good the texture can look highly detailed and non-tiled with just 3-5 colors). Splatting or layered textures and maybe some height based texture decisions. There seems to be persistant use of fog to speed up rendering.
When I think about it, the WC3 editor can actually do basic terrain shaping already. All in all I like the approach they're taking with the non realistic graphics style.
It looks like this engine is based off of the Warcraft III engine. I was playing in full detail and wouldn't say the textures were very detailed (but i'm not saying they were poorly painted either, if the artist is good the texture can look highly detailed and non-tiled with just 3-5 colors). Splatting or layered textures and maybe some height based texture decisions. There seems to be persistant use of fog to speed up rendering.
When I think about it, the WC3 editor can actually do basic terrain shaping already. All in all I like the approach they're taking with the non realistic graphics style.
Oups wasn't logged in. Maybe the engine turns on/off LOD depending on graphics settings? I couldn't notice LOD or popping at all for the terrain.
Author
anon: yeah...i was actually planning to keep using the Warcraft III editor since i have an existing viewer for war3 maps.
iosys: i remember LOD sliders, so that could be it =)
iosys: i remember LOD sliders, so that could be it =)
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