[gameprogrammer] Re: designing map format

Olof is right, there is alot you want to do. His list is is a good starting place for 3D terrain, and you can go from there (roads, ai pathing etc)
I did heightmaps, view frustum culling, and basic terrain collision (with no interpolation). Pop me an email if you need some sample code/hints with any of these
I recommend you start with the NEHE heightmap tutorial. Then build a terrain class from that

For reading values from XML, i recommend the SXP library ( http://sxp.sourceforge.net/ ) Im assuming you are using C++ though, and may be wrong.

-Josh

Olof Bjarnason wrote:

my hint to you: don't try everything at once. i get the impression you
are "cramming" in several new things in one project. if you are
serious about progression, try to take a small step at at time. so
choose one of these things to investigate as a first step:

1) height maps
2) terrain collision detection (eg. via bilinear interpolation of
height map values)
3) quad trees / view frustum culling (for excluding trees outside players view)
4) level of detail (for rendering low-detail trees in the distant, and
high-detail trees nearby)
5) texture mapping with coordinate generators (texgen in opengl)

choose one of 1-5 and do a (simple) project on the subject. then
advance to the next one, with more confidence

/Olof

On 11/17/05, Roger D Vargas <luo_hei@xxxxxxxx> wrote:


Im trying to design a map format for my game based, if possible in xml.
What I want to achieve is something very similar to a tile based map,
but to be rendered in 3d. I would like to have some hills, terrain
effects and objects like trees or houses, but with the possibility to
determine if a location is passable by just reading map information
without calculating collisions (that is far from my reach now).
My current ideas are to have the map represented in sparse form in xml:
I define a main texture that will be applied to non-descripted tiles,
then I make a list of location (tiles) that differ from that texture
(like roads), also I would store height for tiles that are not flat.
Rendering non-flat tiles is a bit tricky as Im not familiar with terrain
renderers, but I think that I can do it by checking when I render a tile
quad if some neighboor tile is raised and then locating the adequate
vertices 1/2 the height of neighboor non-flat tile. Of course, this wont
produce a nice looking effect, but it is what I can achieve by myself.
Any suggestions or ideas about this?

--
Roger D. Vargas
http://dsgp.blogspot.com | Linux, programación, juegos


______________________________________________
Renovamos el Correo Yahoo!
Nuevos servicios, más seguridad
http://correo.yahoo.es


---------------------
To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html







---------------------
To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html








---------------------
To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html


Other related posts: