Darwinia

[CadeF]

Would it be alright if I were to create a realtime 3D terrain renderer, which looks like it was inspired by the Darwinia screenshots? If yes, I'll post screenshots here and a link when I'm done (EXE,Source). If not, I'll just keep it to myself.

[Stewsburntmonkey]

I can't see any problem with that. People have been creating complete rip-offs of Introversion's Uplink for years, so I don't think a terrain renderer will be a problem.

[xander]

I doubt that anyone would be offended. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember an After Dark plugin that created terrain much like Darwinias. That ran on my Mac II, so it must predate Darwinia by at least 15 year :)

xander

[FinnG]

its pretty hard to copyright a landscape anyway

[CadeF]

Hm... but the screenshots will look like Darwinia. Just not exactly, but more or less like Darwinia. Thanks for the replies, I should have a few screenshots sometime this week or next.

[CadeF]

Alpha screenshot


I know, the sky is not Darwinia-ish. I'll get around to that.

Apart from that, comments?

Next up: Sky...
Boxy clouds? Or fractal clouds?

Boxy clouds - Like Darwinia
Fractal clouds - Layers of perlin noise scrolling with an additive blend

[Darksun]

What are you coding it in?

[xander]

CadeF wrote:

...I know, the sky is not Darwinia-ish. I'll get around to that. Apart from that, comments? :) ...

I would even go so far as to say that the landscape is not really Darwinia-ish. Your landscape looks like a fairly smooth, curvy landscape, with a triangular grid placed upon it. In Darwinia, each triangular grid cell is a portion of a plane -- it is flat; one polygon. I don't think you had anything to worry about, really, in terms of violating copyrights, &c. As to the sky, what can you do with a blocky perlin noise routine (i.e. very large "pixels" or some such)? That might look rather neat...

xander

[Stewsburntmonkey]

Yeah, this definitely looks like a landscape with a triangular texture placed on it rather than the way Darwinia is built you are actually seeing the polygons that are the landscape. But it looks pretty nice even if it is not exactly the same thing.

[Tortanick]

Reprograme it to look more like darwinia curvs just aren't the same, and use the fractual sky

[xander]

Tortanick wrote:

Reprograme it to look more like darwinia ;) curvs just aren't the same, and use the fractual sky

Yeah, curves are for |uz0rz!!11!!1!1oneoneeleventyone :P

xander

[Darksun]

Well, it kinda looks like the Future War screenshots

http://www.darwinia.co.uk/extras/development.html

[CadeF]

VB.NET, DirectX9 + HLSL.

To make the landscape more "triangly-shaded" and not smooth shaded,
D3DDevice.RenderState.Shademode = Flat
A simple change

Wow, all those posts really got my attention all of a sudden

Anyway, I'm going to work on the water now. More soon.

Edit, after reading the posts more carefully:
I've darkened the textures a lot. The grid lines are a lot more noticble. Also, I've now started using the flat shade mode.

Perlin noise clouds - Think like Quake 1, sort of, except with an additive blend for each later.
I'm going to do Darwinia's clouds first, without the mesh grid. A simple SetTexture and I can use a noise texture on them. Some HLSL and the clouds will look like plasma, or realtime noise morphing.

For now-

[xMs]

Looks good, only thing I would say that could do with improving would be the lighting.
It dosen't look like it has reached it's full potential for that aspect.

Got a higher quality image/render?

[xander]

It needs anti-aliasing, too, though I am sure you will get to that in the end, or not at all.

xander