The Eden Project

[Mr_SquarePeg]

Hey there HeadClot,

Ok, lemme see:

1. 1e+3km : No idea
2. Making this public : Sure! If I can get it stable enough I'll make it a marketplace product, otherwise I might just open source it.
3. EMOS : Don't know, haven't used EMOS before, had a quick look, seems like it might be doable
4. Coordinate system : Nothing! At least at this size which was a (nice) surprise. At some point it will freak out though, and when it does I've got a bag of tricks to reign it back in.

It'll probably be another month or so before I get some basic texturing going, still have quite a bit of mesh work to do.

Re Dev grant, well that would certainly be nice

Could get a proper desktop at home, three monitors...

Sadly, the queue for dev grants is a million people long and no-one from epic has expressed any interest in eden so... *shrugs* who knows, maybe down the track when I've got more going?

If you make a marketplace product - I would be really happy. This makes one of my larger game ideas a very strong reality.

Let me know if you need people to bang on your planet system. To Improve user friendliness for the overall workflow.

To answer the question of 1e+3km is the plum scale it's roughly 1000 by 3km similar to the power of 10. 1.7e86 would roughly be 17000 with 85 0's. Found that info out on another forum and a lot of google searching. It's basically 1000 by 3km though if I am correct.

Hey [MENTION=446]Keiyentai[/MENTION] - Thanks for the reply. The more you know

[Keiyentai]

To answer the question of 1e+3km is the plum scale it's roughly 1000 by 3km similar to the power of 10. 1.7e86 would roughly be 17000 with 85 0's. Found that info out on another forum and a lot of google searching. It's basically 1000 by 3km though if I am correct.

[ioFlow Studios]

Hey there HeadClot,

Ok, lemme see:

1. 1e+3km : No idea
2. Making this public : Sure! If I can get it stable enough I'll make it a marketplace product, otherwise I might just open source it.
3. EMOS : Don't know, haven't used EMOS before, had a quick look, seems like it might be doable
4. Coordinate system : Nothing! At least at this size which was a (nice) surprise. At some point it will freak out though, and when it does I've got a bag of tricks to reign it back in.

It'll probably be another month or so before I get some basic texturing going, still have quite a bit of mesh work to do.

Re Dev grant, well that would certainly be nice

Could get a proper desktop at home, three monitors...

Sadly, the queue for dev grants is a million people long and no-one from epic has expressed any interest in eden so... *shrugs* who knows, maybe down the track when I've got more going?

[Mr_SquarePeg]

First off this is awesome loving it!

So got a few questions -

1. In the bottom picture it says 1e+3km. What does the 1e of the equation mean?
2. Do you plan on making this available to the public? Yes? No? Maybe?
3. Will this work with EMOS by [MENTION=11717]DigitalKarnage[/MENTION]?
4. What did you need to change with the default unreal Coordinate system to get this working?

Cannot wait to see this planet textured.

Dev grant BTW Apply for it!

[ioFlow Studios]

But the really good bit is the lod range of the whole system...

Here's down on the ground using 14 octaves, terrain quads are 1600 cms across (each extra octaves halves this size again):



And here's the whole planet in a side orthographic wireframe view weighing in with a diameter of a little over 400,000,000 cms:



So, I *think* that can be wound back like so:

400,000,000 cms = 4,000,000 meters
4,000,000 meters = 4,000 kms
4,000 kms =(ish) 1/3 the diameter of the earth

So for the first pretty big size test, I'm pretty happy with the results.

Performance is fine, given I'm doing all this on a four year old laptop. Size wise it can probably go quite a bit bigger, but to be honest it's already doing big enough for my purposes. I'll try cranking the octaves up to 16 though just to give me a bit more detail around the player position.

Obviously all very rough around the edges, will code out the gaps between the octaves next, then tweak the vertex normals to follow the surface properly (they're all 0,1,0 at the moment).

[ioFlow Studios]

And here's the same shot from a wee bit further out:

[ioFlow Studios]

Spent most of saturday hunting down an id10t error on the bottom floor of the code that was stopping the terrain from doing more than 13 octaves.

Now that that's sorted I can crank up the size a bit and see what UE4 can handle.

So here's one of the content rooms sitting near the surface (manually positioned at the moment) and one of my spaceship models just for a sense of scale:

[UnrealEnterprise]

Nice...

[ioFlow Studios]

Now that I've got the mesh sort of behaving it's very easy to throw in some basic simplex noise to see what it looks like with some height variation on it:

[ioFlow Studios]

Fixed up a glitch that was ripping holes in the mesh if I moved the focal point too quickly (in the editor) which was driving me nuts.

Thought I'd see what the mesh look like 10,000 times larger with the subdivision levels cranked up from 3 to 8, no discernible impact on the frame rate

This is just me flying around manually in the editor, in game the lod focal point will follow the camera around and drop detail as your altitude gets higher.

Also, all the mesh generation settings are adjustable so I'll probably increase the density of all the patches (they're currently only 8 x 8 edges and each lod is made up of 4 x 4 patches).

The real performance challenge is approaching quickly - dynamic texture generation - each of those levels of detail will be getting their own texture.

[ioFlow Studios]

It certainly is

[tupikp]

Is your code working in UE 4.11 as well?

[ioFlow Studios]

And here it is in game:

And for the record, I'm working on a five year old laptop so don't be too freaked out by the framerate

[ioFlow Studios]

Alrighty then, *finally* get to show a working demo of my spherical terrain code in UE4

Still need to fix a few glitches that happen if I move the focal point too quickly, and I need to find a way to make the whole thing go faster...

But still, I'm pretty happy with the progress (even though it's taken AGES to get this far).

[UnrealEnterprise]

Keep the progress coming! Remember sleep is for wimps