Creating out of bounds landscapes

Development World Creation
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1

Hi, we’re creating a flying camera rts in a realistic environment landscape, and are trying to get ideas on the best method to create the out of bounds areas surrounding the playable map areas? Our fps constraints are quite tight, so methods where we can keep complexity to a minimum where possible…

At the moment the main idea is to carry the map landscape on and populated beyond the playable area and on its outer edges blending it into a skybox that includes landscape in its lower half for the outer periphery. But as the camera can fly quite high and a fairly flat angle this would probably need a lot of out of bounds landscape area to be created, which won’t be too good for performance and map construction times…

So was just wondering if anyone knew any other methods or optimisations that can be used for creating these out of bounds areas?

Any ideas would be great
Thanks…

2

… and this is why games with horizontal cameras use fog!

(And also why Starcraft is in space, and has a black background.)

You can also model mountain ranges, canyons, massive cityscapes, prison walls, or whatever other bounds you need, as roughly blocked out shapes with painted texture, and stick 'em a bit out in the background.

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Consider this, on 110km x110km you still see the drop off while in air.
blending the skybox with height fog makes it less noticeable.

Adding an infinite water plane works best for the water side.

The mountain side needs some sort of skybox texture if you can. On realistic representations of the world, you kind of can’t…

4

Thanks will give that a try… surround the playable area with a semi opaque fog and see how it looks. Maybe not fully opaque, but just enough so the landscape beyond it is obscured enough to be low poly and only have to be populated with lower poly larger terrain objects… Then at the most distant extent of the ground fog blend that into a skybox with a similar ground fog painted around the horizon with distant mountains or rolling hills or sea rising beyond it … with the transition between the ground fog and skybox blended/obscured using an extra layer of height fog…?