State of Fortune

[Kroniz]

Runs awfully smooth!

[RobinB]

Looks awsome however i found 2 things:
Gras looks really low quality from close.
Water looks odd (repetitive) from an distance (showing the tiles).

i see you have one big quad to draw the water all over, how did you manage to not make it glitch with the triangles from the terrain?
When an triangle intersects with the big water quad, my test was glitching like hell.

[Roquen]

Food for thought:  You might what to peek at atmospheric scattering...a cheap model can do a reasonable sky and the extinction + inscattering will make the terrain look much more realistic.

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[Mickelukas]

Looks awsome however i found 2 things:
Gras looks really low quality from close.
Water looks odd (repetitive) from an distance (showing the tiles).

The up close I was planning to solve by adding "real" grass in your close vicinity. The other way is to use a better texture (already using one of 1024x1024) or pushing it together (makes it look very repetitive far away).

The dudv/normal map indeed looks very weird when far away, I'll look into what to do about that, maybe mip map it less to make it shimmer a bit.

i see you have one big quad to draw the water all over, how did you manage to not make it glitch with the triangles from the terrain?
When an triangle intersects with the big water quad, my test was glitching like hell.

The terrain is drawn using one call, not one for above and one for underneath the sea. The way to draw it like that and still use it for reflection/refraction is to use clipping.
I.e.
Set clipping to only draw where z<0 (under water)
Draw all terrain, all terrain above water will be clipped away
Set clipping to only draw where z>0 (above water)
Draw all terrain, all terrain under water will be clipped away

Food for thought:  You might what to peek at atmospheric scattering...a cheap model can do a reasonable sky and the extinction + inscattering will make the terrain look much more realistic.

That sounds great, I'll look into what it is and if I can implement it

EDIT: Right, that's what I meant with having gradients on the sky for sun rise and sun set. I didn't know the fancy word

Mike

[krasse]

Nice water shader!
It could be improved if you allow the specularity of the water to vary. Water gradually stops being a mirror when the angle increases. But then you might have to change the shader for rendering the terrain?

[Mickelukas]

Nice water shader!
It could be improved if you allow the specularity of the water to vary. Water gradually stops being a mirror when the angle increases. But then you might have to change the shader for rendering the terrain?

Thanks!

There should indeed be some kind of sweet spot. If you currently look down you will see the bottom of the sea instead of the clouds. But there is nothing that stops the reflection when looking really far away (It should become increasingly blurry). I don't think I'll spend too much time on the water though as it already looks better than the rest of the engine.

Mike

[Roquen]

Food for thought:  You might what to peek at atmospheric scattering...a cheap model can do a reasonable sky and the extinction + inscattering will make the terrain look much more realistic.

That sounds great, I'll look into what it is and if I can implement it

EDIT: Right, that's what I meant with having gradients on the sky for sun rise and sun set. I didn't know the fancy word

Nah, that's not what I meant.  You could use a gradient for the sky and that would be pretty reasonable, but I think a physically based model would probably be around the same cost (assuming you're doing a texture look-up for the gradient) and not give you the flexibly to change atmosphere conditions.  But really I was think more about the terrain.  Some unoptimized examples by bjgil2 here:  http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/atmospheric-scattering/28366/view.html

[Mickelukas]

Nah, that's not what I meant.  You could use a gradient for the sky and that would be pretty reasonable, but I think a physically based model would probably be around the same cost (assuming you're doing a texture look-up for the gradient) and not give you the flexibly to change atmosphere conditions.  But really I was think more about the terrain.  Some unoptimized examples by bjgil2 here:  http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/atmospheric-scattering/28366/view.html

That is a big lump of code If you could do what you might and create a minimalistic version I'd definitely have a stab at implementing it and see what the graphical nice-ness vs performance impact is.

Mike

[Roquen]

I'm intending to...just lack of motivation & free-time are slowing me down.

[Tim Spekler]

You're water shader is nice ! I love the blue light coming out from water at night (even if it may be not made on purpose).
A farming game would be sweeeet  !!

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[Roochie]

This is so awesome! and i think a farming game is a super good idea. i would definitely play it a lot . Also, i was wondering where you learned to render realistic terrain and water and stuff like that. I've only learned how to do really basic 3d graphics, so im trying to expand my knowledge

-Roochie

[Mickelukas]

Also, i was wondering where you learned to render realistic terrain and water and stuff like that. I've only learned how to do really basic 3d graphics, so im trying to expand my knowledge

I spent something like 2-3k hours on State of Profit, which is where I learned how to do 3D. The fancy things in this engine I learned since I started working on it about 3-4 weeks ago. Most of it comes from googling around and testing things out and figuring out how other people did things and then doing things the way I envisioned it. My best advice is: Be curious and push yourself

Mike

[Roochie]

Also, i was wondering where you learned to render realistic terrain and water and stuff like that. I've only learned how to do really basic 3d graphics, so im trying to expand my knowledge

I spent something like 2-3k hours on State of Profit, which is where I learned how to do 3D. The fancy things in this engine I learned since I started working on it about 3-4 weeks ago. Most of it comes from googling around and testing things out and figuring out how other people did things and then doing things the way I envisioned it. My best advice is: Be curious and push yourself

Mike

Ok kool, thanks! Thats pretty much how i've learned what i know about 3d programming thus far. Searching countless forums and articles and wikis haha. usually once i understand the theory of what im trying to do, i can prototype it in java. And then after rewriting my code a couple times i'll get a result closer to what im looking for. Lately though i havent been trying very hard to learn this more advanced stuff, sometimes I just get exhausted by it. But this project is super encouraging! keep up the good work!

[Ultroman]

Awesome! Runs perfectly smooth. Thanks for the "hold-shift-to-run"-feature

[Mickelukas]

Awesome! Runs perfectly smooth. Thanks for the "hold-shift-to-run"-feature

Thanks I'll update the applet tomorrow.

I added texture splatting (smoother sand at beaches, rocks when steep and snow on high flat areas). I also made light depending on the depth of the sea bottom as well as ground textures being more crisp.

Mike

EDIT: Updated it now instead, the higher quality ground isn't really well optimized but it seems to work

[wreed12345]

This looks really awesome!
I went to try it and i get this error:
ClassNotFoundException
org.lwjgl.util.applet.AppletLoader
any ideas of why this is happening?

[Mickelukas]

Does other applets usually work? I don't know, I'm using the simple default version of the lwjgl loader...

Mike

[HeroesGraveDev]

And put this into the game: http://xkcd.com/873/

That's awesome

The main reason I don't want to make a pure fps is that there are so many of them out there and I cannot compete with them without making something unique. While the xkcd thing is quite unique I don't think it'd make the game better ;-)

Letting people code and create their own game is going to take a pretty big programmer base that is really dedicated to it, which isn't very easy to get.

So, I prefer to have something where users create their own experience without having to program. While I'm still thinking about the genetic experiment farming game suggested above I'm not sure how to make such a thing

Mike

I was just joking by the way.

Letting people code and create their own game is going to take a pretty big programmer base that is really dedicated to it, which isn't very easy to get.

So, I prefer to have something where users create their own experience without having to program.

Look into some sort of scripting.

If you can create a world and entities from external files (ie: not programming), you should be fine.

[Oskuro]

Any fun idea what kind of game to make it into?

An idea I'm considering doing someday^tm is to develop a similar terrain generation engine (or mod minecraft), and then build a pure survival game out of it, as in you need to hunt and scavenge for food, tools, weapons, to make clothing to survive cold weather.... and be chased around by angered bears.

[Mickelukas]

That sounds quite nice. A bit like Stalker but in a nature environment. I'll spend some more time on the engine before deciding if and what to do with it You should at least be able to chop down trees but if you need to do that to build a farm or a campfire I have no idea

Anyone with comments on the new texture splatting?

Mike

[RobinB]

It gets better and better, however, still got some complaints:

Very light patches, seems like its glowing at night:


Also small puddles of water are kinda ffed up (i know how hard it is to fix this).
And maybe make the transition of the texture splatting a bit sharper, it goes into each other so smoothly, it looks kinda odd.
3rd point, the water waves now stand 90 degrees to the land, its ruins your beautiful water effect.
Last, The reflection in the water is to clear, the waves should brake the light some more at the waves, and maybe an bigger overall blur.

Same stuff is was messing with when i tryd to make something similar, hopefully you got more luck on this.

[Mickelukas]

Lots of nice comments, thanks!

I just made the stone transition less smooth, I'll do the same with the sand and look into the glowing

The waves are tricky seeing as it is a randomly generated land. I'll look into making the water a bit smarter when it comes to wave direction.

I kinda like the clear water reflection but you are right that it is very clear when reflecting something that is far away.

Mike

[Mickelukas]

I've been busy with preparing the new server for state of profit but found a few hours to improve on the engine.

The landscape is now four times as large
The loading time is four times as quick
The performance hit of enabling high quality ground is a third as big

You should be able to get some nice vistas now with the bigger landscape while having a better fps.

I'm currently making a bit of a to do list, some big ones are grass, sunset/sunrise coloring the sky, shadows and more kind of trees. It'll be nice when the engine is good enough to support some kind of game

Mike

[wreed12345]

I got the "game" to load but all i see is a blue screen....

[Mickelukas]

I got the "game" to load but all i see is a blue screen....

That has happened me a 4-5 times as well, a reload solves it. I'll try to make it happen while having debug turned on to see what is going on.

If it isn't a one time thing: any clue in the java console?

Mike

[wreed12345]

the game works after 2 reloads. this is really awesome!

[Mickelukas]

Thanks! I am looking into building things (your farm?). The texture looks really bad (just reused the one for the trees) and the lack of a shadow makes it look like it is floating, but at least it is a start



Mike

[wreed12345]

this is really beginning to look really really cool!!! if only i could make a game like this 

[Ultroman]

@wreed12345: Put a lot of time into it, and you can! I've been programming since I started college 2 years ago, and I only recently felt confident enough, that I could implement the Box2D (physics) part of libgdx into a game. While I have been very busy at college, I've spent most of my spare time experimenting with Java2D (and some Swing), because the guys at this forum suggested that I get the basics right first, and I wanted to know what goes on behind the scenes of libraries like libgdx, before I dove into them. I've gained so much experience just testing stuff out, and reading source code (mainly Nate's and Mario's, and Ra4king's gameloop) on the web. I can highly recommend this approach. You'll come out right in the end, heheh.

Keep at it. Once you get 2 dimensions right, the steep learning curve of the third dimension will be easier to climb...I hope

Back on topic, this project is getting more awesome by the minute!

[Varkas]

How did you make your tree models? They look very detailed and I'm curious how you get them display so efficiently