Development Diary 3

Three months since our last post, where does the time go?!

Okay, new dev diary for you. If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you’ll know that we’ve still been very busy with stuff, including, yep, Project Utopia.

By the way, we setup a Flickr page for Project Utopia if you didn’t already know.

Those screenshots look neat, huh? However, we hit a bit of a dilemma. The terrain system featured in those screenshots looks impressive, but there’s various underlying problems. Not only that, but Ogre, the 3D engine we use, has a brand new terrain system in the works. Here’s a lowdown of the advantages/disadvantages:

Current terrain:
Advantages:
- Beautiful, powerful atmospheric system.
- Feature rich including paging, splatting, normal and parallax mapping etc.
Disadvantages
- The sky with atmospheric scattering is intensive and requires a decent graphics card.
- No dynamic weather.
- Uses the old Ogre terrain system.
- Shaders are commercial.
- Support is not great.
- Slow development.
- There are still many unsolved bugs.

Ogre’s terrain:
Advantages:
- Very efficient.
- It’s just a world object, not a “scene manager”, so that allows for a huge amount of flexibility, even with the possibility of seamless indoor/outdoor support.
- Great support and rapid development.
- Alternative sky has dynamic weather.
Disadvantages:
- No atmospheric scattering, though it will support it eventually.
- Other disadvantages are down to the fact that it’s still WIP.

So what do we do? Well, basically, it “makes sense” to go with the Ogre terrain, because it’s going to be the best choice in the long term. But that means we have a lot of work to do to catch up with the graphical quality of the old environment.

Here’s where we’re at so far: