Hi everyone, I''m writing a 3d landscape engine (isn''t everyone? ) and I''m trying to decide how to make the landscape. I''ve already decided on making the landscape myself, rather than randomly generating (using noise functions, etc.) because of the type of game I want to make. However, one thing I''m having trouble deciding is how to determine which texture to put on each tile. I can think of two ways: 1) Manually, using the landscape editor. (Dark Reign 2''s editor is like this.) 2) Automatically. Algorithmically decide which texture is most appropriate for each tile. The first way is a no-brainer, but it requires a lot of work on the part of the level designer. I''m sure people have already thought about the idea of automatically texturing a landscape. I was wondering what sort of algorithms work in practice for doing this. For example, "if the tile is more than 75% vertical, give it the ''cliff'' texture." Anyone? -mother

One way to have a lot of control with relatively easy editing is to create one large texture (2048x2048) and "drape" it over the landscape. You would probably have to break up the actual texture into 512x512 pieces for video card issues. This would only work if your terrain was convex and not complex...

Oh yeah I forgot to say why it''s so easy to do that above. You wouldn''t have to code any type of editor yourself, you just load up Paint Shop Pro and have at it. The drawback is that you gotta have semi-decent artistic skills.

First of all, I have a Voodoo 3 2000 and it only supports up to 256x256 textures.

But my question was not how to texture the terrain, it was how to determine which textures to use. Were you suggesting that one texture drape the entire landscape? That would be really hard to do, because the texture would have to correspond exactly to the height field. For example, if you wanted to have a snowy whitecap on the top of a mountain, you''d have to know exactly where the mountain was, where the corresponding place on the texture is, and draw the whitecap there. If you had multiple mountains, this would really suck.

I''ve already decided on using small textures, and using one per tile. So each tile has an attribute and texture, such as "grass", "dirt", "rock", "cliff", "whitecap", etc. and I want to automatically figure out which is most appropriate for each tile, using an algorithm. This would mean that landscapes could be generated quickly, since only the heights would have to be modified.

A seperate issue is blending adjacent tiles that have different textures so there''s no abrupt edge (grass to dirt, for example).

Thanks,
-mother

YEah I guess you are right that it would be hard to do, unless of course you have a heightmap file of your terrain. Then you should know where the high land is etc... However, if you are doing it proceduraly then ''draping'' wouldn''t work. I still think it''s a lot easier than writing a full-fledged editor.