Hay guys,

after a long break in GS8 (I found my reason in Unity3D) I decided to switch back to GS8, I don't really know why. I wonder how the commnity her is still this active like none else though I thought that this is a "dead" engine.
Hovever... I don't really know why I want to try my luck again with GS8 but at trying little things I figured out some problems I had everytime which I want to solve now with your help..

1: How can I create such a big world like in WoW? I don't want to create it that big but I ever wondered about how they can get the nice ways in the terrain (are they a seperate model or texture) and even how they can get so much detail in such a big world? Would this still be possible in GS8 too?

2: How to make simple behaving grass? Is grass usually a model with animation? Two 2D Sprites with a shader? I dont know but I want to know because I want to make some!

3: How to make (realistic) water. (Never looked for it, maybe I can get a good answer here)

By the way if it's helpful I have GS8 Commercial...
Big thanks to you for reading this and maybe even for answering, Simon

1:
LOD. Lots of LOD. And a good database with all objects. You don't have a levelfile but some kind of database where you just query every object in your surroundings (give me all objects in manhattan distance x). All objects get deleted/instanced/reused as good as possible as the player moves and the terrain is also stored in some special "queryable" format.

2:
One sprite per grass "chunk" is much too less to get a good performance. You need to create merged "chunk of grass" models that contain a multitude of grass chunks, a good example would be splitting up the small.hmp from samples into 4x4 or 8x8 tiles depending on the quality you want to achieve....
Behaviour for grass can be done with a shader (wind swinging and so on)

3:
Depends on what you call "realistic". In some games the default water shader is enough, in other games you need a specialized shader for your needs.
In short: Know shaders very good and you get your realistic water...

Regards
Felix

Thank you MasterQ,

1: Actually I never heard about those things but I googled LOD quickly. Semms complicatet. Is there a good tutorial or way of how to do it? Espacially I mean how to do something like dirt ways in WoW or streets in a city all in one terrain?

2: I don't really know what you mean... May you give me a simple example or a model?

3: Thanks. Are there some good water (or even grass shaders) in GS8?

All in one thanks for your quick help!

You should learn the basic theory of the stuff you want to do

1:
Start reading some articles about LoD Management:
http://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&q=level+of+detail

I don't know how the dirt ways in WoW look or how they are created but you could create models at runtime (maybe just once as you want performance) that will feature the stuff you want to have...

2: I can just give you the direction:
Create a dynamic model based on the terrain height that contains several randomly rotated quads displaying a gras texture. The quads may be snapped to the terrain height to get a better look.
A more modern engine would allow improved and really dynamic gras patches:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mscStU9rwaM
This is a demo i've written to test tesselation and geometry shaders in OpenGL4, not usable in GS

3:
Yes, they are some basic shaders. Read the manual to find out where and how to use them

Regards
Felix

Thanks again for you answer.

1: I also don't know how they look. It just don't looks like the ways in modern games a seperate model... So i wonder how to get such good paths or something like that. Ancient roads or whatever. Woulnd't it be a lack of geometry using a seperate model just for 2D street use?

2: So you mean a sprite with quad? Then i need much sprites rotated and all centered? So no model but a collection of sprites? And then a good shader?

Thanks, Simon

for 2: No, you built a model at runtime (eg. via DynamicModels from TUST) that contains a lot of quads/sprites. Using one sprite/drawcall for each single quad is way to slow (factor is pretty huge)

1: I just looked up some screenshots. If you mean something like this:

This is just a basic multitexturing shader

Regards
Felix

Thanks again for your reply,

1: I actually still don't really know what you mean. What is TUST? I really don't want to use some external libraries. You mean a dynamic model (generated by script?) which has vertexes and doesn't contain sprites?

2: Okay thanks for the multitexturing tip! Is there something like a good tutorial about multitexturing? I know the basics but I'm actually not a real pro in it.

Greetings, Simon

Edit: One more question to (2):
Is it also possible to do something with multitexture like this:

I mean the different ground textures perfectly fitting into each other. If yes, may you tell me how?

Thanks, Simon