Windlight Wishes

Windlight Wishes

1. Abillity to 'paint' on the terrain. Pick a brush, select your picture (grass, rock, sand) and paint your terrain. I know this is available in other 3D engines.

2. Abillity to use a second heightmap for water. This way we can have real looking water on multiple height levels. Picture a big pond 4 meters above sea level.

3. Alpha textures fix. Also available in other 3D engines.

4. Rain, snow, and other weather related.

5. Shadows!

What do you think?

Amiryu Hosoi,

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1. Abillity to 'paint' on the terrain. Pick a brush, select your picture (grass, rock, sand) and paint your terrain. I know this is available in other 3D engines.

-too much traffic for the server!

2. Abillity to use a second heightmap for water. This way we can have real looking water on multiple height levels. Picture a big pond 4 meters above sea level.

-this should be doable as well as reflecting and refracting surfaces/mirrors (some debug settings enable this effect, more or less).
-this WILL be doable when they enable flash streamed textures, which they plan to do.

3. Alpha textures fix. Also available in other 3D engines.
-Those engines are NOT OpenGL or have a vertex buffer as powerfull as needed for thousands of objects in one scene without VISibility calculation.
-OpenGL SUCKS at the alpha layer, it is an engine for compartibility and not so much for fancy effects (except for vertex shading, which it can do easily since Quake3).

4. Rain, snow, and other weather related.
-they work on them, they are included in windlight but disabled in sl for now. mostly because sl can not differenciaate between "inside" and "outside"

5. Shadows!
- Impossible without VISibility calculation, for now. Otherwise just to processing intensive, would need like 5-10 GhZ GPU and that is too rare to make an engine for.
- I still wait for realtime-raytracing (games being like an interactive pixar movie). that would definitely enable volumetric shadows in opengl. Sadly realtime raytracing requires at least a STXTEEN GIGAHERZ GPU, or a network of 4 to 8 4-GHZ pcs. There are demos of realtime raytracing, in opengl, volumetric refraction is great. Processing speed still doubles every 10 months or so, for the same price, so calculate yourself how long to wait.

What do you think?

I like the terrain texture painting idea. I'm thinking using vector lines or some such, it would be pretty smooth. I'd take it further and wish for painting 3d grass onto the terrain.

Day,

thats the idea, check out the Torque Engine at www.garagegames.com

Cheers,

Ami

You already have a thread devoted to this. Stop duplicating.
/13/e9/240864/1.html



What the hell does that have to do with the thread? If it's your "hey look it's my sig that's not actually my sig" then you're spamming. Quit doing it.

Shadows are the one glaring omission from SL graphics, which are otherwise pretty good now, with WindLight and a good graphics card. They would make a huge difference to the visual experience.

Given that we have water reflections now, which are dependent of the position of the viewer, daytime shadows, which only depend on a fixed light source, shouldn't be impossible. Shadows from all artificial light sources might be a bit more taxing. I can't see how ray-traced shadows would be impossible, though I'm not about to explain how it could be done!!!!

What fixed light source?

Oh, you mean the sun.

Which moves.

Every 4 minutes.

* less options... thanks