APOCALYX is a...

free Game Engine based on OpenGL (MAIL) (SITE) (FORUM) (BLOG)

Friday, May 2, 2008

Tiled terrains

A few days ago I talked about the infinite terrains available in APOCALYX. The main characteristic of those terrains is the complex heightfield, correctly shadowed, but mapped with the same uniform textures along their whole extension.
Tiled terrains, instead, are useful when it’s necessary a flat ground plenty of different features, similar to the levels of some 2D game, where complex environments are built from a small set of tiles. Even in a 3D world such a feature may be useful.
You can find an example of tiled terrains at work in the “Steering Behaviors” demo included in DemoPack1 (read the yesterday’s post) or, better, in “Dragon’s Ride”. In both cases, the terrain is built from the nice free tiles, known as “Circle Textures”, from “Lost Garden”. Those tiles can be arranged in several different ways: the “tiled terrain”, implemented in APOCALYX, takes a single large texture, including all the tiles, and applies them on the ground according to the designed fashion. Give new 3D life to your 2D tiles!

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