Saturday, April 19, 2014
She's Leaving Home
Some more steps further.
I restyled the mountains, now they look like mountains and not like vomit.
I also decided for the appearance of units when going on top of mountains. I've spent a week or so testing the various options to solve a nasty problem: when a unit climbs a mountain the slope will cut through the unit's 3d shape, and the effect is not so fine. The options were to rotate the unit by an amount equal to the slope, which would have required a complex calculation of pitch and roll on the basis of relative heights of intersection points between the mountain and the unit itself.
This had the downside of actually rotating the unit, which would have created immense difficulties when calculating the contact between enemy units.
Another option was to recreate the profile of the slope by capturing a sample of the heightfield equal to the area of the unit, then use this cropped heightfield to re-shape the unit, in practice it would have followed the altitude of the mountain, only it would have been slightly moved upwards. This posed technical difficulties related not much to obtaining that cropped heightfield but rather to applying that same calculation to all the units visible in a game.
The third option has always been to just scale the unit so that it simply topped the highest point it was upon in a given moment. However I didn't like the appearance of a tower on top of a mountain, so I decided to move the unit on the highest of point, and then to create a semi-transparent column beneath it, so that it was clear which area it was currently covering but at the same time it was not horrible as the simple scaling of the unit.
A picture is worth a thousand posts, so here you go.
I restyled the mountains, now they look like mountains and not like vomit.
I also decided for the appearance of units when going on top of mountains. I've spent a week or so testing the various options to solve a nasty problem: when a unit climbs a mountain the slope will cut through the unit's 3d shape, and the effect is not so fine. The options were to rotate the unit by an amount equal to the slope, which would have required a complex calculation of pitch and roll on the basis of relative heights of intersection points between the mountain and the unit itself.
This had the downside of actually rotating the unit, which would have created immense difficulties when calculating the contact between enemy units.
Another option was to recreate the profile of the slope by capturing a sample of the heightfield equal to the area of the unit, then use this cropped heightfield to re-shape the unit, in practice it would have followed the altitude of the mountain, only it would have been slightly moved upwards. This posed technical difficulties related not much to obtaining that cropped heightfield but rather to applying that same calculation to all the units visible in a game.
The third option has always been to just scale the unit so that it simply topped the highest point it was upon in a given moment. However I didn't like the appearance of a tower on top of a mountain, so I decided to move the unit on the highest of point, and then to create a semi-transparent column beneath it, so that it was clear which area it was currently covering but at the same time it was not horrible as the simple scaling of the unit.
A picture is worth a thousand posts, so here you go.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Here Comes The Hotstepper
Things are going fine. I finished working on world machine, since I've reached an acceptable level of clarity in my map, I'm now working on the integration with quest3d. What I'm trying to realize now is a linkage between the map that you see and the terrain types that compose the map. Once it has been done I'll just have to decide the number of tiles that the map will be composed of, this is going to be purely a trial and error process.
I've been thinking again and again about switching to unreal 4, they introduced blueprints which really look like very powerful, but that would mean to spend months learning that program alone. I'll stick with the dead quest3d until I really reach some point where I just can't go on with it.
I've been thinking again and again about switching to unreal 4, they introduced blueprints which really look like very powerful, but that would mean to spend months learning that program alone. I'll stick with the dead quest3d until I really reach some point where I just can't go on with it.
Thursday, April 03, 2014
Heart Of Glass
Here's the results of my efforts so far.
I have the following terrain types: water, plains, coast, beach, urban, hills, mountain, forest, farmland, road, river.
I have to add desert for sure, then ports and airports, what else do you need for a wargame? I think there'll be time to add more things in the future, but for now I'll stop here with the map development, it is time to think about how to integrate this map into quest3d. This is going to be painful I think, I'll find myself with mammoth map files because for every scenario I'll have a heightmap, a texture map plus a zone map, where every terrain type is coded.
But for now let's simply enjoy my test map with all base elements there in good random order.
I have the following terrain types: water, plains, coast, beach, urban, hills, mountain, forest, farmland, road, river.
I have to add desert for sure, then ports and airports, what else do you need for a wargame? I think there'll be time to add more things in the future, but for now I'll stop here with the map development, it is time to think about how to integrate this map into quest3d. This is going to be painful I think, I'll find myself with mammoth map files because for every scenario I'll have a heightmap, a texture map plus a zone map, where every terrain type is coded.
But for now let's simply enjoy my test map with all base elements there in good random order.
