Terrain design
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Terrain Development Resources
Chunked LOD Terrain Engine
Original web page introducing Chunked LOD as a terrain rendering algorithm:
http://tulrich.com/geekstuff/chunklod.html
A discussion in the CSP forum about some useful ideas how to use and extend Chunked LOD:
Forum thread (http://csp.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=58&start=90&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=)
Other Projects
Some observations about the terrain used in Lock-on: Modern Air Combat
LO-MAC Terrain (http://csp.sourceforge.net/owiki/LomacTerrain)
White paper about terrain technology in
Microsoft FSX (http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/6/f/56f5fa07-51a4-4c0d-8a9a-2e8539214f2e/GDC2006_Szofran_Adam_Terrain_v1.doc)
Next Steps with Terrain Development
The following steps should help to move the terrain aspects of CSP forward.
Make Chunked LOD work again
- Try to build the Chunked LOD demo, which can be found in SVN (see link in my messsage above)
- Build a terrain map for the Chunked LOD demo. There should be tools and documentation how to do this. We also had a map on SourceForge, but the link is broken
- Figure out (and document!) how to use the Chunked LOD engine in CSP
- Integrate the new terrain map with CSP
- Move the existing 3D objects from the Balkans map to the new one
- Think about future extensions (geotypical procedural terrain generation etc.)
Evaluate OSG's terrain rendering capabilities
There was a lot of progress in OSG's terrain rendering capabilities. OSG can be used to build huge terrain databases the can be rendered out of the box. It will make a lot of sense to find out what exactly it provides today. A question about the Chunked LOD for OSG implementation CSP is using on the OSG mailing list was answered with a hint that the current OSG terrain implementation eliminates the need for Chunked LOD. You can check the full discussion thread here (http://groups.google.com/group/osg-users/browse_thread/thread/ea41c8cf9d04bd09).
Moreover, there are some very interesting geodata processing tools that could potentially be used for theater construction (at least for the terrain part of it).
Things to do:
- Evaluate OSSIM (http://www.ossim.org) image processing library with regard to elevation data processing, satellite image processing, resampling and reprojection capabilities
- Check the Palomino flight simulator (http://www.palomino3d.org) that uses OSG and OSSIM for terrain
- Find out what kind of terrain rendering algorithm OSG uses and how it performs compared to Chunked LOD
- Evalute what it would mean to use native OSG terrain capabilites as a terrain engine for CSP
ChunkLod Demo
The demo created by tulrich is located here trunk/csp/tools/chunkdemo_prototype
To build it make sure that you have installed the following packages (fedora names)
libpng-devel SDL_image-devel
Enter the directory and issue the following command:
make
