Just to let you know how things are progressing, here are some new screens from my engine.

I've now implemented multitexturing via a new method which I've termed as "alpha splatting".... a variation on the traditional texture splatting algorithm but requiring virtually zero per-frame processing, and virtually infinitely small texture cell resolution (you can literally "paint" other textures onto the landscape, with varying levels of opacity).

I've also improved skybox rendering significantly, as well as implementing a new tesselation algorithm which not only scales detail with distance, but also attempts to maintain detail in priority areas (more variant terrain blocks are allocated more triangles).

I've also added basic water support (single texture, no ripples, refractions or reflections at present)

Anyway, here are the screens:

[img]http://www.ninjazone.net/Xenos/Screens/EngineScreen6.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.ninjazone.net/Xenos/Screens/EngineScreen7.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.ninjazone.net/Xenos/Screens/EngineScreen8.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.ninjazone.net/Xenos/Screens/EngineScreen9.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.ninjazone.net/Xenos/Screens/EngineScreen10.jpg[/img]

Comments/criticism welcome, the feedback from previous threads has been invaluable. :)

All I have to say is... Wow! The close-up shots are great, you just need to fix those squares in the distance. (pictures 1 & 2) ;)

Yeah the ground looks kick ass, it'll be hard to improve on the ground.

As for the water, I have no idea how to help you with that, all I know is the colour needs to be a semi dark blue.

The water DOES need work, but overall it looks great!

Great Job, All I can say is that I'm impressed.

Just a little transparency and environment reflecting for water is needed(?)

For those with higher-end cards (Geforce 3... or anything that supports Shader v1.1 or higher) I'm currently constructing a custom pixel shader for the water, which will allow a full body of water to be rendered, complete with ripples, specular lighting and environment mapping....using only 2 triangles for the entire scene.

For those without, I'll be implementing some basic transparency, environment mapping, and texture co-ordinate warping (to give a sense of fluidity).

Skybox looks pretty bad...but that should be easy to fix.

Far away mountains are weird...water looks old-school but okay.

Close up ground is amazing.

Here's a nice shot of some terrain from about 350m up.

I like this one :P

[img]http://www.ninjazone.net/xenos/screens/airshot.jpg[/img]

Holy crap. . .that's awesome :o

Very nice looking. Each time I see these shots, they're getting better and better.

This last shot. . .there's one area that looks a little weird, toward the bottom left. I don't know if its the angle or what, but it looks a little less precise than the rest of the terrain.

Other than that, it looks pretty good.

~Death_Ryder

I'm curious, how many FPS do you get? What resolution are you running at and color-depth? Are you using DirectX or OpenGL?

DirectX for this project.

I'm running at 1024x768 on a 1.3ghz Celeron-2 with 512 meg ram and a Geforce-3 Ti-200.

Without frustrum/PVS culling the engine renders a 1024x1024 terrain section at ~60fps at the quality you see there.

With PVS and frustrum culling, it varies between 60fps and 200+fps depending on where you're looking from.... though mostly for a game you'll be "down there" in the terrain, where it averages around 120-150.

By applying a double base-mesh size, it's possible to get that figure up to 250+fps average, but with a small loss of visual accuracy at distance.

Edit: 32-bit RGBA color :)

So.. In other words it can run great on a half decent system, while still looking good. Nice ;D

That's pretty good. I'm writing a 2d space strategy game using Direct3D8/VB6, although there are some nice ship graphics I'm mainly writing it to better learn DirectX (a demo here, just graphics nothing else). I should probably start using C++ soon for the stuff I want to write since VB does have it's limitations. Where are you trying to go with this project?

Wow that overhead shot looks amazing, I haven't even seen terrain that good from high up in Planetside...