I am home again and still have some days off.
The problem is that my wife knows about it and her todo list is much longer than the daimonin todo list.

So what happened the last "days" to the client3d?
I have found a way to speed up the tileEngine alot. It has the sideeffect of an extra Atlastexture,
but I can't see another way to make client3d work on small computers, so I don't care about it.
We only use 3! texture units for drawing the terrain +  1 texture unit for the terrain shadow.
When you take a look at other engines on the ogre3d site, you will see that other projects need MUCH more units to do the job -
so I think we have found the right way.

Currently red is on the shadow part (including the coding of the shadow forumulas!) and I am on the documentation of the engine.

I bet she has a detailed roadmap too.

Sounds great!

Should we really be restricting the potential of the 3D client to low-end PCs (which is what it sounds like)? Is it possible to use the features of modern video cards, but still allow reduced effects for PCs that can't manage decent graphics?

Personally, I always liked "Slider" switches which changed everything from low res-looking to high-res looking in games.  Mainly because i liked to max out the game and still watch the FPS sit in the 100 or so range (like Oblivion).

Either way, i think WOW got it right to build their game for relatively advanced machines for their time, and about 5 years later, it runs very well on 5 year old computers.  At the same time, i don't know how our map making complexity will slow down (increase the frame usage) a computer.

On the other side of things, with those slider switches, i thought that, in some games, one of the sliders turns things from looking really "polygonal" to "not polygonal" by "smoothing" the corners/edges somehow.  This way a tree trunk make of maybe 10 polyons, doesn't look like it has "squared" sides, but appears to be round, because the engine somehow "rounds" corners.

Just a thought, donno if its possible... i thought for sure i saw it somewhere tough...

@smacky
Yes she has. On the roamap stuff we could learn alot from her - and on her power to force it to be done NOW.

@grommit
Well, I never said that. But to get it work on samll machines is very important.
Its very easy to add highres textures or a bigger map. But its hard to make it work fast.
So the hardest step on the terrain rendenring is done now.

@tpk
dont talk so much. Where are my tiles?

Lol, poly .

The progress sounds great. I wish i could help somehow :/

Cheers,
Unislash

@unislash:
what about playing with the filters?
there are 4 filters for every tile. 2 looks nearly the same.
they where drawn alternately to prevent seam (same for the tile).
so there are 2 filters per subtile:
1 for the corners and 1 for the middle of all 4 sides.

Ok, cool. What should my goal be?

atm, every tile has the same filter, but ne need individual filters for all the 32 tiles.
btw, the current filter was done be me in 5min, so this one can be replaced by a better one, too.

Ok, and what uh... is the filter? I don't know what the object of my project is (at all ). Are they graphical? Can i get some examples... pictures... something to explain a bit more?

Cheers,
Unislash

when you start the client, you can see that the tiles doesn't have sharp borders but floating into each other.
that are managed by the filters.
they are stored in the media folder next to the tiles.
its a trial and error game to make good filters (at least for me), so just play around a bit with them...

Ok, poly, i see what i'm doing now . The only problem is that i can't isolate a filter ingame so that i can see the effect of my change to it... Is there anything that you can do for that?

Cheers,
Unislash

the filters belong to their tiles. means filter_00_*.png belongs to terrain_XX_00.png
you can see the filters in the Atlas_*.png file or ingame when you look at the tile the filter belongs to.
lets say you have changed the grass filter. when you look at the grass spreading out on the other tiles then its your filter.

Sounds like its going good.