EagleEye

I'm looking in to http://game-engine.visual3d.net/

well, it's looking like this engine isn't the right one for me then... straight out of the developer's mouth.

And just as an aside... home-grown solutions are what I'm trying to get away from... so rolling my own landscape system would pretty much invalidate using the editor, which is what I want to be able to use in the first place.

I guess my question then would be... what sort of height map granularity should I be going for then? If it's 1px per meter, that's only 4.1km^2 for the entire world... which is pretty tiny. However, if I can get away with like, a 1px per 10 meters, that's 41km^2... but that really depends on if there's good smoothing between heightfield pixels or not. Even then, I'd probably want to get at least up to the 100km^2 range, meaning a 25:1 ratio... 25meters between pixels on the heightfield, at ground level? Surely there's another way to approach large landscapes in this engine?

That's what I figured... okay then, that's cool... So I can make like, a single continent in the editor, and stitch them together as multiple continents, with a large water plane as the sea, and a large floor as the "bottom of the ocean" type of thing... What about if I have 2 landscapes side by side and want them to flow together? Is there a way to "fix the seams" between them? OOPS! Disregard all that... I had not yet seen page 2. :-p

Well, there are ways around it all... You can make multiple terrains and use each one as its own continent. I'm wondering about landscape paging... is that in the engine already, or would I have to do that myself? Or is this 2048x2048 thing ONE landscape, that I could potentially use as a single tile in a grid system, and do landscape paging myself?

Wow, thank you for all the kind responses! I love the reactions to the "language elitist" stuff. It made me smile! So yeah, I have my own networking solution (home grown) and it works just fine. Also, I was looking at the wiki, specifically in the 2D drawing stuff... I think I can take my EEGUI product that I did for TrueVision, and port it over. Really, a GUI system is about 90% "managing of the structure of the GUI", and only about 10% is actually "drawing it all to the screen". Really, when it's all said and done, I think I use engine-specific features maybe in 50 total lines of code out of 4500. So as far as GUI and networking go, I got that covered with my own home-grown stuff. Really my big concern is world building and world management, as well as quick prototyping, and ease of 3D integration. I want my game world's PRODUCTION flow to be simple. "Oooh, new model from my art team!" *moves file to folder* *launches some editor of some sort* *imports the file in to the game* *immediately sees the finished model in the game world* Something like that... no converting to a new format or anything like that. Quick, simple, easy... Thank you all for your replies! When I'm ready to start working on my game again, I'll be getting the demo version and working with it to see how I like it. (That may be a month or 2 from now... but I'll keep in touch!)

Another quick thing I should mention... I really want to find a community that is helpful and friendly. One of the reasons I stuck around with Truevision3D for so long was because of the community. I was willing to deal with what the engine lacked, and work on producing my own middleware, simply because the community was one of the nicest and most helpful I had ever seen. One of my biggest problems is what I would call "language elitists" that absolutely HATE vb.net programmers. I encountered it in my experimentation with XNA, which caused me to stop even TRYING to work with that engine after only 1 week. I have found that VB.NET developers are often looked-down upon as "noobs" that don't know what a "real programming language is"... even from C# programmers (whose code is compiled in to almost exactly the same IL code). I have taught computer programming at the college level, and taught myself upwards of 7 or 8 languages over the course of the last 17 years of professional experience. The last thing I want to do is join a community that will disparage me for my personal preference of language... In the Truevision community, I found that the biggest disincentive to bash on other people's language choices was the fact that it was a company trying to make a profit. The owners would not allow "language wars" to go on, because it deterred business from coming their way. In the Open Source communities, where profit wasn't really a concern, such acceptance of others was generally not the case, and elitism ran rampant. Anyway, enough rambling from me. Thank you for your time in reading this.

I know I'm asking a biased crowd here... but I really need to know if this engine is right for me. I have been working on a game design for over 10 years, and have been struggling for the last 4 or 5 years with many different engines. I started with one called Auran "Jet", but that company went out of business. It was also 100% Java, and buggy. I worked a bit with Ogre3D, but hated the community. I was involved in the Ogre3d port to support .net languages, but that was a ton of work and hassle. I've been working with Truevision3D for the last 3 years, and what I've finally concluded is that it's really not what I need. Why? Every single one of these engines is nothing but... well... a rendering engine. They are not game development tools, and they have no real support for the type of game I want to make. When it comes to the game I'm making, I guess you could say I'm really "needy". 1) I need huge landscape support. I can't be using BSPs with portals, for example. I want a huge seamless world. 2) That said, I need some sort of way to produce that world. I was using L3DT and Terragen, but seriously L3DT took over 2 weeks to process a landscape the size of a small island (18km^2). This is simply not an efficient use of my time, especially since results aren't apparent until the whole process completes, and any changes to the foundation of it requires another 2 week processing cycle. 3) I need physics support, and would prefer it to be native to the engine, rather than some sort of Newton plugin. 4) A built-in GUI system, with editor, would be wonderful... I had to write my own GUI engine for Truevision (which is one of the favorites now of the truevision community)... I guess my point is... I want to work on making my game, rather than work for YEARS on making all of the middleware that is involved in the production of assets for the game. I need an engine that has that middleware already in place. I mean, seriously, my next project was to make an asset management app! Most of these other engines don't even have the capability to use encrypted or password protected .zip files! I'm just saying... I'm tired of programming all of the basic stuff that I should be able to find elsewhere in professionally done pre-written libraries. (I wrote my own network code as well!) My biggest problem is the fact that I simply can't stand writing in C++ syntax, and really prefer VB.NET. (please no negative comments about my choice of language, thank you.) I already know that there is a .NET wrapper (written in C#, but exposing VB as well), so that's all good. I'm very impressed with what I saw with the scene and landscape editors. I guess there's networking involved as well. As I said, I want to be able to make my game... not spend all my time working on my own middleware... I want to be able to quickly prototype stuff, not have to convert models and manually move files and textures around... I am so frustrated by it all, and I want to know if this engine is the sanctuary I've been looking for. I'm sorry if this message seems a little... well... crude... I'm just at my wit's end and am pulling my hair out trying to find the right solution. The price of this engine is comfortable for me... I need to know if it'll be money well-spent, and give me all the tools I need to just make my game. Thank you, Jared Mark