I am experimenting with massive terrains and effects on performance.

I have a terrain, a dude i control and a large sphere around the dude that Serves as a view distance controller. I am not using the normal view distance because i want other things to show up beyond my own view distance like the sky and a low poly mesh of the whole landscape.

Now I also have a detailed high poly mesh of the same terrain. I screwed around with the view distance and realized that hiding the terrain beyond the sphere's area does nothing to the performance. Its still being rendered there. (you just cant see it)

My question is. Is there a way to not render it at all beyond a certain area. In my case, not rendering the terrain at all beyond the area of the sphere.

Clipping is done by camera distance. You normaly have a sky sphere just short of the clipping distance so you don't see anything clipped.

However it won't clip an object if part of it is in the visible screen.

You need a better clipping routine that clips limbs for that. I'm not sure how you do it but I think 3D World Studio uses it somehow. I'd like to know how to use it can anyone else help?

I've noticed something odd about advanced terrain too. It will render objects to both sides of a hill even though 1 side is facing away / obscuring half the objects. I think Lee needs to do a bit more work on AT clipping

Well, i am using geoscape 3d to make my terrain. I heard that advanced terrain and other things can divide a large terrain Into sections.

Unfortunately, i do not have a credit card, so i cannot buy any of this (you need a credit card to buy stuff of the internet).

so geoscape is the only thing i have.

the clipping distance doesn't do much. The landscape is still rendered beyond the clipping distance

I am using a sphere as a clipping dist controller because if i need to see things like sky and stuff, i can just turn off the z depth.

what i need to know is if its possible to completely stop rendering an object if its within a certain parameter.

BTW, is there some free software or anything i can use to split a terrain into sections?

no, that wouldn't work would it? i will have to constantly render and un-render stuff. I guess i better split it up into cells or something.

The problem is, Geoscape is all i have and it cant do that.

there might be a plugin for it though.

I did some searching around and found this by Lost in Thought it's supposed to have limb cullin but I've not had time to test it yet.

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=67369&b=6

culling doesn't do anything for me, i tried. I need to split the terrain into pieces. if anyone has T.ED or something, i can send them the .x mesh if they can divide it into sections.

Just use Advanced Terrain, it's included in DBP and will automatically cull the terrain limbs.

Ah, didn't know it culled AT limbs, it sure is faster than a matrix the same size!

That is my current stratagey AT with objects plonked on it, my only problem is... is there a way to make a shadow map of my objects onto the seperate terrain? (without forking out £45 for 3DWS)

i.e. does anyone have any function in DBP to burn a shadow?

I do not have advanced terrain!, my dbp is a school educational version that did not come with professional terrain.

If i already tried culling the entire terrain, (3000x3000) it still ran slower than a 1000x1000 terrain.

However, i did hear about some direct x command that automatically, lowers polygon count after a certain distance.

AT is easy pagan, you just make a grey scale image of high and low points, an image to paint ont it (grass,paths,dirt), and a detail image for the close detail and DBP does the rest with a few simple commands...

load image "media\texture.bmp", 1
load image "media\detail.tga", 2
make object terrain 30000 ` create the terrain object
set terrain heightmap 30000, "media\map.bmp" ` set the heightmap
set terrain scale 30000, 8, 0.8, 8 ` set the scale
set terrain split 30000, 8 ` split value by 16 * 16
set terrain tiling 30000, 4 ` detail map tiling
set terrain light 30000, 1, -0.25, 0, 1, 1, 0.78, 0.5 ` light - xdir, ydir, zdir, red, green, blue, intensity
set terrain texture 30000, 1, 2 ` base and detail texture
build terrain 30000 ` finally build the terrain

@PAGAN -

Then you should get that fixed, it's far easier than what you're proposing. LiT's limb culling code will do the same thing as the AT culling for a multi limbed mesh. You just don't have anything you need to do this with. You just need to get the proper tools.

a question, I do not understand the consept of culling "Limbs"??

what are limbs supposed to be in a terrain?

Someone should remake this thing so it applies to direct x meshes because i am having a blast getting anything to work in advanced terrain.