Terrain

[Yacoby]

The other thing that would might help loading times would be to use the Ogre Paging rather than the cellLoaded/cellRemoved to decide when to load terrain as there are 4 blocks of terrain per cell so we may be loading too much.

EDIT: Downside is that it would take some reworking as RenderingManager doesn't seem to know about the overall ESM store which the terrain manager would need *shrug*

This would probably need to happen anyway if people wanted distant land. I take it people would prefer distant land as a post 1.0 feature? (As said on IRC, I could probably throw something together fairly simply. As the majority of the work has already been done and so all it would need is to create a few large meshes and then optimize it using Ogre, then create textures using the composite map generation).

[Greendogo]

Ogre3d 1.8 is probably not going to be out until after this year's Google Summer of Code and that's not going to end until August 27th when the event's results are announced for each project. So Ogre3d 1.8, thus, won't be released until sometime after August 27th (excluding further release candidates).

I'd like to request a temporary placeholder for terrain such as a low continuous plane using either the wilderness terrain texture or something like a checkerboard pattern so that walking around outside would at least be possible. I don't know if this is something you can't do for the same reasons that you can't already do regular terrain, Yacoby, but it would at least be something. I can't really justify why something like that would be useful though, it's not like we can't already fly all over the place.

[psi29a]

Or we just statically compile against Ogre1.8 and later decouple it when it has finally made it into modern distributions.

[Zini]

That is not a problem of linking or packaging or an OGRE version not present in repositories. I would just like to avoid using an OGRE version that is still in RC state. But as I wrote before, we will review the situation again, when we have released 0.13.0.

[Greendogo]

Oh, I see, that's what you're waiting for. That's totally understandable to wait for 0.13.0. If you want to get terrain out before August, though, you might have to go with an RC first, because they definitely aren't releasing the actual 1.8 until at least August 27th. At least.

Update March 11th: Sorry, I was relying on an old post referring to GSoC from 2011. CABAListic says:

We are currently fixing a number of issues with the Ogre samples. Once that's taken care of it will be released.

[Yacoby]

Just a FYI, there are a couple of bits of code that need sorting out, I don't have time to fix them this coming week but I should have enough free time after that.

[Zini]

No hurry! We are still aiming for 0.14.0 and that release is still a good while away.

[Yacoby]

I should have fixed the issues mentioned above.

I am right in saying the main issue now is the crash when terrain is integrated with the physics engine?

[werdanith]

I think the fact that the terrain makes heavy use of shaders, which is bad news for half the linux ecosystem of graphics drivers and hardware is worth mentioning...

[Yacoby]

Solution: Don't touch ATI with a bargepole?

It would be possible to write a fallback material that didn't use shaders I think. The downside of this is that it is a lot of extra work and probably wouldn't be as fast as the shader version. It is also quite a lot of work.