island/terrain surface textures

[fasad 1]

Heya all,

As a mapper, I've been wondering about the new terrain engine.

Quote[/b] ] from the BIS wiki :

Surface type is represented by two large textures placed over the entire map: satellite map for far away representation and look up mask refering to complex surface representation in close range (that includes multiple texture layers and optionally small ground clutter objects).

Does this mean that the new engine has completely given away tiled textures? I know modern video cards can do hardware blending removing the need for transitions, but what is the "look up mask"? Does 1 pixel on this = location of a detail tile/patch? Obviously the engine can't load a single texture that covers the entire island at full resolution - it would have to be at least (512^2)^2 pixels for noe quality!! Is anybody familiar with how such an engine works?

Cheers : )

[jakerod 254]

Wow never saw that before. That is awesome.

[CameronMcDonald 146]

What that excerpt seems to say to me:

There's one huge massive ultra texture to show up when far away from an area (eg, when viewing from a hill, or when flying, etc) and a grid of smaller textures (which seems to be the so called "look up mask") with more than one layer, and perhaps models of small objects? Not sure about the last part, since I have no idea how you would include a model in a texture bank.

[fasad 1]

i guess it means the look up mask contains data about what ground clutter objects (grass, stones, etc) should be placed in that area. it means the placement and type of these objects is directly linked to the terrain type. seems like a very efficient method. how this information is actually stored is beyond me. maybe it would be an extra channel similar to alpha?

[norsu 180]

It seems to me that texturing is done like in Oblivion. You have one (Oblivion had several) big texture for lower terrain LODs and then what you can see around the player is a mixture of different texture types (normal, specular etc.). Clutter objects could also placed directly in Visitor, maybe it's a simple "paint" tool.

I just hope this has been done well and it doesn't look like the blurry porridge from Oblivion .

[The_Captain 0]

This sounds like technology they developed for the military simulators. Once they got it ironed out, I'm sure it made it much easier to make maps based on real world locations, rather than tile it by hand.

(Plus, I'm sure they get to use the hyper-resolution military satellite maps...)

[cbfasi 4]

Also sounds like old ofp maps haven't got a hope ...

[mickuzy 0]

yeah by the sounds of it our new playground is gonna make ofp look like a preschool drawing.

[Commando84 0]

haha well thats a good thing.. i guess maybe a bit bad for island makers wanting to convert their islands need to rework stuff from scratch or something..

[cbfasi 4]

haha well thats a good thing.. i guess   maybe a bit bad for island makers wanting to convert their islands need to rework stuff from scratch or something..

Yeah even worse if island work has been halted. This may mean a complete scrapping of hundreds of hours of work..

[simba 0]

Quote[/b] ]Yeah even worse if island work has been halted.  This may mean a complete scrapping of hundreds of hours of work..

I'm sure your work isn't lost , all these hours you spent making island texture was a very good training !    

[UNN 0]

While I can't volunteer for the job. I'm sure it would be possible to write an app, that creates these large image files from the texture blocks used on the original OFP islands?

[fasad 1]

It should be easy enough to write such a program, although it would be better to create new data that isn't limited by tiling.

In my experience by far the slowest part of island creation is placing man made objects. Since we have a whole new set of objects, most of that work will need to be redone. Ground textures were probably less than 5% of the total work (assuming you're not making any new addons).

[Daniel 0]

So is it not going to be hard work for people to get hold of large hi res satellite images of areas? Seems like island building is going to be a lot more complicated.

[GBee 0]

Daniel @ Oct. 21 2006,16:25)]So is it not going to be hard work for people to get hold of large hi res satellite images of areas? Seems like island building is going to be a lot more complicated.

For a start, I don't think it's going to be required that you have the large texture - it will probably fall back to using the old OFP system or allow you to create that texture by stitching the tiled textures together.

Secondly, don't forget that Sahrani is fictional - it wasn't entirely lifted from hi-res satellite imagery. Neither will you need such imagery to create your own islands. However if you are recreating a real place and already have such satellite photos, then it will make the finished article a little more realistic.

I personally doubt that BIS will release the software for translating satellite data into maps any time soon, so it will be difficult or even impossible to accurately map a real-life sat image texture onto a handmade island. Most islands will probably use a composite image from the higher LOD textures or something hand made.

Edit: One typo down, to go

[UNN 0]

Quote[/b] ]Secondly, don't forget that Sahrani is fictional - it wasn't entirely lifted from hi-res satellite imagery. Neither will you need such imagery to create your own islands. However if you are recreating a real place and already have such satellite photos, then it will make the finished article a little more realistic.

It's based on real world data, here it is in Google Earth.

From the wiki:

Sahrani

[chipper 0]

fakeness

[GBee 0]

It's based on real world data, here it is in Google Earth.

[im]http://community.bistudio.com/wikidata/images/thumb/4/45/sahrani_google_earth.jpg/300px-sahrani_google_earth.jpg[/img]

From the wiki:

Sahrani

UNN - that's not really from Google Earth

It's a fake knocked up by the guys at BIS for the purpose of the blog. No such island exists in the real world.

If anything it demonstrates the single texture concept - that was probably an early version of the one used for Sahrani in Arma.

[UNN 0]

Oh well, more fool me if thats the case. Did I miss something, or is it an in joke?

[fasad 1]

I would think that while using publicly available satalite images would be quick, the results would be a nasty. The colours are faded and inconsistant between locations. I assume you'd then have to remove unwanted details from the image anyway - such as shadows and objects that aren't modelled in the game. From my understanding of the engine, you'd then have to create consistant detailed textures. Also, I beleive using 1:1 real terrain is not ideal use of a game engine with such a limited view distance.

The one thing we can actually be working on right now is suitable heightmaps. We know that Sahrani is ~20km x 20km, though unfortunely we don't know how many data points (cells) that is. Having looked at some screenshots, it seems Sahrani uses a cell size of 20~25m. 20m x 1024?? To be safe I'm working with 4096^2 - it can always be scaled down.

[coderdfox 0]

The whole idea of not being able to load a HUGE texture into memory is wrong. Alot of programs to save memory will crop the texture down. Now if you think about a game the client computer will only have to crop out a section that the player sees. This will bring the size way down. And the server will not be displaying GFX so it can load multiply crops.

just an idea

[fasad 1]

Quote[/b] ] The whole idea of not being able to load a HUGE texture into memory is wrong. Alot of programs to save memory will crop the texture down. Now if you think about a game the client computer will only have to crop out a section that the player sees. This will bring the size way down. And the server will not be displaying GFX so it can load multiply crops.

I'm sure the engine could use large textures, but creating and working with single huge textures is going to be hard if not impossible.

[[aps]gnat 28]

Thats related to previous BIS notes about "Streaming" maps, but I thought it would be the 3d data again, but I guess it could also be the textures too going by this info.

FYI, Europa Tech (see corner of map) is into Sat. Map tools, so its likely they provided BIS with a large fictious composite Sat. image based on BIS's requested specs.

[Sturmwolf 0]

I like the idea of being able to search for some tiny island via Google Earth and Convert it to a map.

From the description quoted in the first place i doubt this would be as easy as stated, because only specific textures would apply to a "grass region" (a texture by which 3D grass is applied automatically - bound to the texture).

Unfortunately, about any sat photo has different color schemes influenced by time of day, weather etc.

Therefore you could only take an original photo as a grid and you would need to do heightmap, texturemap, alphamap by hand.

As you would now.

[UNN 0]

Quote[/b] ]FYI, Europa Tech (see corner of map) is into Sat. Map tools, so its likely they provided BIS with a large fictious composite Sat. image based on BIS's requested specs.

Thanks Gnat, I did assume they had used satellite data, seen as the game is advertising the feature. I'm sure real world data could be combined or manipulated to get what they wanted.

Quote[/b] ]From the description quoted in the first place i doubt this would be as easy as stated, because only specific textures would apply to a "grass region" (a texture by which 3D grass is applied automatically - bound to the texture).

Traditionally games would use a simpler bitmap to hold that kind of data. But even if you use a regular satellite image for just the texture, as you say, then it's going to reflect the direction of the sun at the time it was taken. So yeah, it might not be such an easy task.