Heightmap

Tormentor667 · Post by **Tormentor667** » Sun Jan 02, 2005 2:50 pm

@giest - Thx, but how does this work in ZDoom?

Nmn · Post by **Nmn** » Sun Jan 02, 2005 3:01 pm

It doesn't, tough some wish it did.

farlowj · Post by **farlowj** » Mon Jan 03, 2005 9:27 pm

Try the map, it somewhat works, if you set the thing heights. It won't be as good as Far Cry or newer games, but for Zdoom, it looks pretty awesome.

Lexus Alyus · Post by **Lexus Alyus** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 6:05 am

Holy crap, almost felt like I was playing Mechwarrior 2 or one of thosde older 3D games (That's a good thing BTW)

. How would one get this to cover a far greater area? I can see good things coming if we canmake the area far bigger.

Chilvence · Post by **Chilvence** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 6:11 am

From what I understand, you'd need an extra byte in the linedefs structure to add much more, which isn't going to happen...

Unless someone can devise a way to use slope things without requiring a reference line. Maybe a hack to use the first line in the sector that isnt connected directly to the slope thing itself? That would work fine for triangular sectors.

Nmn · Post by **Nmn** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 11:34 am

It's bad You can't make slopes by raising vertices and sloping the plane from that. Then it would be very easy to just criss-cross a large area with an isometric grid-like sector arrangement (or traingular sectors) and just manipulate vertices to raise/lower hills.

Lexus Alyus · Post by **Lexus Alyus** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 10:27 am

Yeah, that would be cool... kinda like a 2D 3D editor or something

.

BetaSword · Post by **BetaSword** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 6:02 pm

I actually had that idea a while ago, and thought that it would be really cool to have something like that available in Doom Builder or something. Like, have the normal view for mapping, 3D view for texturing, and then an isometric view of the grid for adjusting heights of sectors and slopes and such. Of course, for this to work well in Zdoom, the slopes themselves would need to be reworked to allow for more control over them, as right now making complex sloped figures is a bit difficult.

Risen · Post by **Risen** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 6:58 pm

Hmm... what about an "elevate nearest vertex' thing?

Macil · Post by **Macil** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 7:56 pm

Vertexes have no z-coordinate.

Risen · Post by **Risen** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 8:09 pm

Obviously. If they did, this discussion would not be happening.

Chilvence · Post by **Chilvence** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 8:46 pm

Good idea Risen, but I can see it becoming overly complicated when you are making a heightmap since you will need loads of height things around each vertex, and must make sure all of them match (if you want it to look right). Also, you still need at least one point of reference to slope from, so you would have to have a sister vertex height thing on the opposite end of the sector.

It would be much more convenient to have a vertex thing that you can place directly on top of a vertex, but there is a problem with this. The height of a thing is relative to the sector it is in, and vertexes arent really linked to any particular sector. That means sloping one sector up to meet with a flat, higher sector would be impossible, since the game would either slope all the sectors around the vertex or pick a random one...

However, if it was done so that the game only took into account triangular sectors that are all connected by vertexes that have slope things on them, I think it might be potentially possible to implement. It still sounds like it would be ridiculously difficult though, I'm having trouble just trying to work out the basic theory...

It would have to first check through every sector to find the ones with only three sidedefs. Then find the corresponding linedefs, then find all the vertexes connected to these linedefs and remember which sector they are connected to, then collect the location of all the slope things and work out which vertexes they are on top of, and only then would you have enough information to actually calculate the slopes....

Unless anyone knows a better way to find out which vertexes are in a given sector?

Lexus Alyus · Post by **Lexus Alyus** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 6:59 am

Maybe such a feature could be embedded into ZDoom itself, like the build engine... This would be cool if randy made zdoom not only the game, but the editor to. This would allow for far more complex things without relying on outside tools... of course, randies work load would increase at least 4 fold

.

ReX · Post by **ReX** » Wed May 18, 2005 10:16 am

Just noticed this old topic about heightmaps, and I thought I'd bump it up the line, as it's now quite relevant to the discussion on the terrain generator for ZDooM.

I looked at farlowj's heightmap wad and it looks very cool. I'm off to try kappes buur's tutorial on creating heightmaps and see if I can give the terrain generator a whirl.

Lexus Alyus · Post by **Lexus Alyus** » Wed May 18, 2005 1:29 pm

From what i've seen, the terrain generator is very impressive.