From time to time we will inform the community of certain areas of Skyline Development. If we have decided to add a new features or new demos in development etc we will try to make a post in this topic.Feel free to leave your comments to help encourage out development team ; )

Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Postby SolarPortal » 01 Aug 2014, 10:35

Hi,
another development update. :D

We now have Terrain surface detection.
This means that for each layer on the terrain painting panel; you can specify a surface name for that layer, then using a lua command "terrain.getSurfaceAtPoint(int xPos, int zPos)",will return the surface that exists at that position in world space.

This is useful for golf games and car games and many others, where you can change what happens to physics, particles, sounds etc..
depending on the texture at the specified position.

There is also a new tech demo demostrating this feature. It changes the particles based on the ground surface hit:
Image

This will be in the next update.. coming soon :D
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Re: Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Postby ant0N » 01 Aug 2014, 11:12

This is very useful! I remember a lot of code was written to achieve this in other engines and not even dreamed that the engine will do it instead of me. :D :D :D
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Re: Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Postby SolarPortal » 01 Aug 2014, 12:38

yes, i believe it will be used in alot of games, but we still need to surface detection for normal meshes aswell.

Another 2 commands have been added that will help with this feature:
> terrain.getTextureAtPoint(x,z) - retrieves the texture name on the terrain at that given point
> terrain.getHeightAtPoint(x,z) - retrieves the terrain height value at that point

:D
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Re: Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Postby pgadesertrat » 06 Aug 2014, 02:41

Thank you guys for listening to our requests! This is precisely what we need for our golf sim and I believe others will find it to be a helpful feature.

I do have a few questions regarding some design tools that in our case will be essential.

1) Are there plans to increase the number of materials (textures) that can be applied to the terrain? We could get by with say 8 materials but ideally would need around 12 to allow for certain course types. EX: the basic requirements for a typical golf course would be separate materials for tee, fairway, 1st cut rough, primary rough, fringe, green and bunkers. Above these basic surface types you will also commonly find one or more of the following: dirt, waste area, water bed, pine needles, desert, etc. As you can see a max number of 12 materials would be very handy. I understand that this would come at the expense of rendering performance as the norm for other engines is a multiple pass for each set of 4 additional materials.
- If additional terrain materials are not possible then do you think a decal system would be a viable option, especially if tied into #2 below?

2) An extended spline system allowing shapes to be drawn which can then be used as constraints for material application or decal materials. EX: you would draw the shapes for each of the above mentioned areas on each golf hole. Then, using a material fill option you could constrain the material applied to the terrain to be only within the selected shape. Doing so would create cleanly defined edges between each material.


3) The final feature we have had lengthy discussions about is a way to blend the edges between each material in a controlled to create a desired look. EX: transitions between different types of grass on the course are subtle but neither hard edge or gradient blended. In other software I have used for the purpose of golf visualization the common blending method is to a apply an alpha blend material between 2 different surface types. I've attached an example of such a texture.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rstjsqmb5sx4ni4/BlendAlpha_3.png

I do apologize in advance if any of these ideas have been mentioned in recent discussions as I have been away for several months due to a family illness.

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Re: Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Postby SolarPortal » 06 Aug 2014, 09:51

@pgadesertrat: Great to hear from you and hope all is well now :D
It all sounds great to have and we will try and fit these improvements in between the spare time we have lol :P, as we head towards a release.
Just like we have with the first feature.

1) As for an extra number of materials, we already have this planned in when we upgrade the terrain shader. Another reason for extra material slots is to add improved shadows such as PSSM(3 shadow texture technique) for crisp clean shadows without losing blending layers.
Yes, it will reduce performance with adding more layers, but at the moment we do not know the performance cost.

2) We have a decent splinepath tool now, so creating a fill would be possible.

3) As for the edge blending with an image. We did have a thought that you could create a circular brush with the same edge detailing as your linear decal.
Then use the remove paint tool (preferable, as adding layers on top has issues atm; square edging when spraying ) on the grass layer to create the different edging instead of a smooth gradient.
Create a black and white image, like your current image, and put the image into the "Data/Terrain/Brushes" folder, reboot skyline and use your own image for painting the terrain.

As for decals, they are on the list to add, but they will still take some time to implement.
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Re: Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Postby howler » 06 Aug 2014, 13:30

Interesting to see that I'm not the only one working on a golf game with the engine!
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Re: Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Postby pgadesertrat » 06 Aug 2014, 16:51

Thanks for the quick feedback.

Thought I remembered mention of plans for the number of terrain materials to be increased from 5 to 10 which would be superb. Glad to read that this is still in the development schedule. Any rough ETA?

A fill option would be great. At the very least, given the fact that the engine does have a quality spline path tool like you mentioned, we had planned on trying to script a custom system. However, having this as a standard feature option would be a lot less problematic:).

Yep, our interim plan to create custom brush types for use with the current terrain painting system. However, down the road we'd like to develop an auto-blend system that worked with the spline fill option you mentioned. So instead of having to manually paint the blends by hand for hundreds of yards of surface area you could choose to add a blend to a spline layer. Not only would this be a huge time saver but it would also be a more precise way of defining the grass cut blends as you would find on a manicured course. It would need to use the same UV mapping as the current road tool to ensure the texture wrapped accordingly which could be challenging.

In any case, things are looking up as the engine keeps maturing so props to the dev team. I am looking forward to the day that we can present some WIP screens and help spread the word about Skyline.

*Oops, one more question. Can the same serial # be used for installation of Skyline on multiple PC's as long as they aren't in concurrent use? EX: I have Skyline currently installed on my main desktop but would also like to install copy on my laptop in case I'm on the road or just in the recliner hanging with the wife while she's watching TV ;) .

Howler - Good to know that you are also developing a golf game. If you ever want to corroborate ideas please feel free to send me a PM.
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Re: Feature: Terrain Surface Detection

Postby SolarPortal » 06 Aug 2014, 19:35

Thought I remembered mention of plans for the number of terrain materials to be increased from 5 to 10 which would be superb. Glad to read that this is still in the development schedule. Any rough ETA?

Currently, it will most likely be implemented after the real release, as our main concerns atm are stability and completing the final jobs such as end game exporter, etc...

Yep, our interim plan to create custom brush types for use with the current terrain painting system. However, down the road we'd like to develop an auto-blend system that worked with the spline fill option you mentioned. So instead of having to manually paint the blends by hand for hundreds of yards of surface area you could choose to add a blend to a spline layer. Not only would this be a huge time saver but it would also be a more precise way of defining the grass cut blends as you would find on a manicured course. It would need to use the same UV mapping as the current road tool to ensure the texture wrapped accordingly which could be challenging.

This is totally doable :D, we need the ability to add ribbon trails for tire tracks on vehicles, so this could be used for the same type of system, the uv mapping would be done automatically behind the scenes. This technique would be useful for your grass blends, lightning effects, tire tracks, laser beams etc...
The hardest part would be aligning the vertices to the terrain floor, but this would also need to be done for tire tracks.
Its just yours would be made in the scene and wouldn't fade or disappear.

In any case, things are looking up as the engine keeps maturing so props to the dev team. I am looking forward to the day that we can present some WIP screens and help spread the word about Skyline.

Thank you for your kind words. :D we are looking forward to all artwork developed by users.

*Oops, one more question. Can the same serial # be used for installation of Skyline on multiple PC's as long as they aren't in concurrent use? EX: I have Skyline currently installed on my main desktop but would also like to install copy on my laptop in case I'm on the road or just in the recliner hanging with the wife while she's watching TV ;) .

I have PM'ed you about this.
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