edit: OK, I was able to log in and edit in IE but not firefox. either way, screenshot is fixed :)

Kibble that LevelEd is very sweet. You should post more info bout your project when it's rdy for public viewing, etc. Wonder how long it took to build that editor?

Thanks for the compliments :)

I've been working on the underlying engine for about a year, while its theoretically platform indpendent (no platform specific dependencies all done through abstract base classes), I have only implemented a Direct3D 8 renderer, the beginnings of an OpenGL renderer, and a crappy unfinished software renderer for fun, that is a very interesting project I must say :). I have done multiple implementations of the other 3 main systems (audio has OpenAL and DirectSound, input has DirectInput, Windows API input, and SDL, networking has an SDL and a winsock2 implementation). The reason I made more than one of each was mainly for learning the libraries involved, and it doesn't take very long.

A little side note about the software renderer, that is the main reason I went with abstracting all the APIs. I wanted a testbed to play with software rendering, without having to create a new project, instead having a good looking scene ready for me to try and render. Once I had abstracted the rendering, might as well abstract everything else ;)

I did/redid the editor GUI several times while developing the main engine, once with plain win32 (that one quickly ran into a brick wall heh), tried again with ATL/WTL, got a little further but still didn't like it. Things were hacked together, little graphical glitches here and there, etc. Finally that version you see there is an MDI MFC app, took about a month to complete it, but it didn't require any graphics, math, etc. coding at all, it is just a shell to my engine. Every window has full docking support.

I also have another editor for my engine, since the level is yet another abstract class, and I have a quadtree and octree implementation. The one you see there is designed for the quadtree implementation, the octree version is the standard four view deal, however it doesn't look nearly as good as that one as its still done with ATL/WTL and I don't know how to do as much cool stuff like docking with WTL.

I could go on forever about the project in general (I can see that I already did ;)), if you have specific questions I'm happy to answer, I can also post more screenshots.

When you put up a site feel free to PM me. Unless you have one now. Anyway yes I'd love to see more screens. Right now I have an engine. Like yourself I abstracted my rendering device. However, the only API I've added support for is DirectX. My engine has minor editor capabilities built in- so that when you're in windowed mode you can click on various options and edit props in realtime. Was trying to get some info before I start the editor. I really like the looks of your editor so I will probably use MFC also. I am going to tell you the truth- when i first saw your editor I thought it was a professional IDE with graphical capabilities. After a few moments I realized it was indeed a custom tool. Nice stuff.

Quote:Original post by sakky
I had a few questions. On a terrain engine, would you to any tricks on the terrain texturing such as rotating the textures a bit or odd blends here and there? Just to give things a little better look.

You can rotate, scale, and translate the textures in my editor but I have to say that the only one that I really use ever is scaling. rotation and translation don't really change how it looks.

Quote:What is the most common effective way to load & render a height map. Are the LOD algorithms worth it? Because I have heard so much trash about them because the pop up and down on the terrain, making thinks look horrible. Still images look nice, but what about moving around and animation?

Depends on what you are doing. For an RTS or FPS, no. A flight sim, probably :). Here is what epic games (UT2003, UT2004) has to say about it (Warren Marshall's posts): here

Quote:I would like to build a terrain engine, but I can seem to figure out how to rend it properly. They always run super slow for me. I need speed, accuracy, and looks. Just like every one else does.

Need more details here, other than that the general optimization stuff, like as many tris per DrawPrimitive call as possible, minimize texture/stage changes, etc.

edit: Two more screenshots:


edit2: vajuras, check out this docking control bar class for MFC, it is really great, that is what I used (the CF version). Before I found that I was messing around with splitters and CFormView and all that other garbage, it is much easier and better to work with that control bar class.