Gigaquad on 31/12/2005 at 13:48
Lately, I've been thinking about how to make editing easier. Jörg Fischer wrote a tool that could interface between the (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88565) Terra Nova Word Editor (TNWE) and (
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/) Terragen, a landscape generator. Since TNWE can import and export heightmaps... And Terragen can export landscapes...:idea:
The first thing was to export (shift-e) a heightmap from TNWE. (
http://www.irfanview.com/) IrfanView says the following:
* xportmap.pcx
* RLE encoded PCX
* 1025*1025 resolution
* 256 colors greyscale (8 bit)
* Every "pixel" is actually 4*4 pixels
I won't get into how I made landscapes in Terragen since I only played around with it a few hours. Fairly easy to use and there are many tutorials and plugins available online. It's possible to import original heightmaps from Terra Nova into Terragen by converting them into .tga with the same resolution as the Terragen terrain size (513*513 is max for the unregistered version).
The Terragen heightmaps must be exported in 8 bit .raw format, not .sgi. I resized the heightmap back to 1025*1025 in IrfanView and saved it as xportmap.pcx in the TNWE directory. I started TNWE and pressed shift-i to import the heightmap, and ctrl-m to recalculate terrain shadows. Success! This sure beats inputting the height values for all 261121 tiles manually!
Drat on 31/12/2005 at 15:29
DAMNIT!
Now I wish even more I hadn't lost the Terrain and World files from (
http://www.acay.com.au/~dunnwell/mtg.htm) my old Terragen renders.
It'd be cool to see how a map from the game looks in Terragen.
Gigaquad on 1/1/2006 at 11:08
Did you use the default parameters when importing? I did a little experimenting with the first of the demo's three missions, which has an easily identifiable lake.
I kept the Terrain grid points at 513*513, but changed Landscape area to 3000*3000m, which is the level size indicated by navigation points. The following settings resulted in a fairly similar contour and scale: Height scale 50%, Height offset -28%.
Drat on 1/1/2006 at 17:58
Thanks for the values. I've done a render of part of the level where you attack the pirate outposts on the little islands. It looked best at water level -99m. -100 puts it below all terrain. I'm not sure if those values will work for all maps. Just keep decreasing the height until you see no more terrain underwater in the sculpting window. I used 1025 for terrain size, as at 513, it only showed a quarter of the map.
(
http://www.acay.com.au/~dunnwell/tnislands.jpg) Islands
Took 3 hours to render on my old 333mhz machine. I don't know what that dot in the upper middle is. Perhaps some rendering error. There was a large visual error around there when it was rendering, but like I have seen before, it was not present in what is is actually being rendered.
Now what we need is a program to output all the tiles used in a level as one big image, so that it can be imported into terragen and mapped over the terrain.
I think the guys behind Terragen would be interested in this. Terra Nova is a very old game, but this does show off what Terragen can do. Games have used Terragen to make skyboxes and textures and such for years... but levels?
Gigaquad on 1/1/2006 at 22:45
Beautiful. Apparently you don't even need to register Terragen for great results, as (
http://www.terranuts.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=5213) this shows :eek:. I need to read some tutorials instead of randomly adjusting sliders...
Quote:
Now what we need is a program to output all the tiles used in a level as one big image, so that it can be imported into terragen and mapped over the terrain.
I just noticed the editor's ctrl-m function isn't documented, but you can enter
any number for light intensity and the shadows will be calculated accordingly. A large enough number will result in no shadows. It's a step in the right direction, since shadows would distort the textures.
Drat on 2/1/2006 at 10:07
Tomorrow I'll be borrowing a much better (but still weak) machine for some time. I may try some renders on it. It takes too long on this one, except for previews, and the memory requirements chew up my system drive with virtual memory. I left too little leeway for my system drive when setting up this system. Soon to be resolved, hopefully.
Shadowcat on 2/1/2006 at 12:47
Awesome stuff, guys!
Love that islands render, too... it would be very cool to see some more of the landmark locations from the game rendered in this manner.
Drat on 2/1/2006 at 14:27
Here are a couple more renders. I'll do larger ones and ones with water on the faster machine. These two renders took 38 and 33 minutes respectively, which goes to show how much more work it is for the CPU to do the reflectivity in the other ones. Granted, these two also show less terrain than the Islands one, leading to less render time.
(
http://www.acay.com.au/~dunnwell/tnplottwist.jpg) A plot twist occured here
(
http://www.acay.com.au/~dunnwell/tnwherepark.jpg) Now, where did he park that ship?