Hi, I'm kinda confused now. I'm trying to make an island with a heightmap of size 1025*1025. It can't be possible without LOD in my PC (p4 2.26 GHZ, GF7300GT, 1GB ram). I've been hearing the geoclipmapping methot mentioned, but when I read the paper it said that it used VTF (vertex texture fetching). That's just inaffordable for me (I downloaded a simple demo consisting of a 128*128 grid with VTF and it just as slow as hell). So I don't think I will use that. Can you suggest any other good methods that use no VTF but still can achieve a huge framerate? (kinda sick when my PC is just too old )
basically I need a LOD scheme with these constraints:
- no VTF
- support at least 1025*1025 (2049*2049 is highly appreciated)
- support terrain editing (my game would be a business simulation game)
- quite simple
currently I'm looking at an article presented by the maker of SoulRide[sup]tm[/sup], but I need as much reading as I could get, and I run out of keywords here, hehe
basically I need a LOD scheme with these constraints:
- no VTF
- support at least 1025*1025 (2049*2049 is highly appreciated)
- support terrain editing (my game would be a business simulation game)
- quite simple
1st step: consider brute force it (albeit the hardware limit for your video card could be around 1 Mega points, I don't remember).
I'm not familiar with 7300 but GeForce4 could render 256k vertices with ease in a single batch. 6600 could do 2-4 vertices per pixel and still run interactive!
Anyway, look into geo-mipmapping. It is simple. It has basically no limit on point count. It runs on everything (CPU-based, preprocessing).
It does not natively support terrain modification but it's fairly close. Hopefully it will allow an incremental operation on data structures.
As a side note VTF is very viable on midrange GeForce since generation 6xxx (albeit initial drivers were a bit slow).
When it comes to 7300 I'm afraid it either does not support the feature or it is extremely bandwidth-constrained (if memory serves VTF required 32bit float channels).
Geomipmapping should work fairly well... 1025 is not a large terrain.
I've got a [s]geomipmapping[/s] geoclipmapping (doh) implementation that can render 128km square terrain with 1m the highest resolution on weaker cards at 10ms/frame (100fps). And thats with a terribly inefficient, unoptimized implementation. As long as the card supports SM3.0 you geomipmapping should work great.
Great paper, has anyone thought of using disc shapes instead of grids and just scale with view height?
Hi Lee , the point of using a grid is its simplicity... How would you implement something similar to the L-Shaped strip that is used to reduce flickering of vertices?
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, the point of using a grid is its simplicity... How would you implement something similar to the L-Shaped strip that is used to reduce flickering of vertices?
