[MUD-Dev] The MLI Project

[Chris Gray]

[Niklas Elmqvist:]

:Another problem with the Quake engine is that it does not work well with
:large outdoor areas, and it is hard (read: memory-consuming) to include a
:lot of "organic" terrain (most Quake-levels are still very angular) such
:as rolling hills, steep canyons and craggy mountains. Using some kind of
:voxel scheme for the terrain rendering would be neat, especially if the
:terrain could be generated client-side using a suitable fractal and a seed
:sent from the server. (I don't think 3D accelerators support voxels,
:however, just texture-mapped polygons?)

I don't have a Windows box, but the last time my mother was in town, we
went out and bought one for her. It came with a game called, I think,
"Magic Carpet". It seemed to do a decent job of outdoor texture mapping,
including fogging. We didn't have a joystick, and we never read any
instructions, so our total exposure was about 10 minutes, however.

Something that I had thought of in relation to my fractal terrain
generation was that you could carry it all the way and use it to help
generate a display like in that helicopter simulation. I saw that one
on a friend's machine, but don't remember the name - it seemed to just
use a large database of detailed altitudes to draw the image in realtime.
I forget the name of the technique, but its been discussed in
rec.games.programmer in the last year or so.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA