LOD based terrain questions

[Bartleby 8]

Does anyone know anything about the .LOD's used on the IcelandNA map?
How many vert's and faces, for example?

[+Gepard 11,277]

The terrain LOD files are hard coded, so you have no access to this files. Thatswhy i belive nobody can answer your question.

[Bartleby 8]

That's a shame.

I guess I was hoping that someone had inside information. I guess asking about the iceland_waves.LOD is a waste of time, too.
Ah, the humanity.
I wanted to know if ~820 tris for the basic terrain  per 16km chunk was reasonable.

After playing with making a terrain based on the ItalySE_93 heightmap, I'm beginning to think the real problem is going to be the texturing.
To have about the same quality as the standard game, a 16.384km chunk would need a 2048x2048 texture on it, and there could be hundreds of chunks.
As far as i can tell, the non-LOD terrain gets around this by reusing textures with differing rotations,  so far fewer unique textures are needed.

I noticed a detail map in the CAT for IcelandNA.
It looks like a splat map that is used for texturing. Is there any information about that?

(Maybe I'll try doing Vanuatu instead of Italy until I get everything figured out)

[+Menrva 4,198]

I would never do a LOD based terrain, performance wise it is terrible, one of the reasons SF2NA failed at launch. I definitely prefer the old system of heightmaps and tilemaps, much friendlier and easier to work with. Had the LOD terrain engine been optimized more, then it would cool to create some interesting things like underground and undersea tunnels which are impossible with the old terrain engine.

There is only one modder who tried making LOD terrains, and that is Stary. He might be able to answer some of your questions, but these days he's rarely around here.

Last but not least, I want to remind that my terrains are not covered by the freeware licensing agreement. As long as you take the heightmap only for reference, that's okay, otherwise you're not allowed to copy my work without permission.

[+Soulfreak 6,522]

On 15.9.2024 at 8:32 AM, Bartleby said:

Does anyone know anything about the .LOD's used on the IcelandNA map?
How many vert's and faces, for example?

That´s one of many mysteries TK only know... 

[+swambast 721]

Quote

I would never do a LOD based terrain, performance wise it is terrible, one of the reasons SF2NA failed at launch. I definitely prefer the old system of heightmaps and tilemaps, much friendlier and easier to work with. Had the LOD terrain engine been optimized more, then it would cool to create some interesting things like underground and undersea tunnels which are impossible with the old terrain engine

Absolute truth there.

[Bartleby 8]

It looks like I'll just have to putter along on my own as there is no real information available.

Menrva: Don't worry. I only used a .bmp generated from the .hfd to try some things out in blender. I didn't want to spend time making my own heightmap until i had an idea of what I'm doing and yours was handy. Those files were played with and then deleted after I worked out a likely way of doing things. The real work will be to work out how texturing was done.
I won't be sharing anything until I can confidently make something using my own stuff, or cc-0 assets.

Cheers.