Oddlabs Forum

I think you're engine is very impressive! Would you agree with the following statement... The basis of your engine is the ability to auto-generate "playable" terrain based on realistic erosion algorithms. Just curious.

I also commented in one of your blogs about deterministic. Does the AI always behave the same way when replayed in TT? How many threads are running during game play?

Thanks for your time!

I guess you could say that.


Yes.


The game itself runs with only one thread. The music does run in its own thread though.

- Sune

Sune, thanks for the response. Took me a lil bit to figure out how your AI would work but then I remembered reading you log the random seed.

Is tree placement based on another realistic algorithm?

Would your erosion algorithms handle different terrains equally well...like a desert?

Are your textures created procedurally? Whats your opinion about the future of procedural texture companies like Allegorithmic (ProFX)?

Not really, it's just a noise function with some appropriate parameters that make the trees group together a bit. The terrain height is also used to decide what kind of trees grow at the different altitude levels.


That depends on what you expect it to do
It's not physically correct erosion in any way. The primary function of the erosion algorithm used in TT is to ensure that all areas of a terrain are accessible via paths that do not exceed a certain inclination, i.e. units must be able to move around without having to climb steep cliffs.


Yes, all terrain textures as well as the ocean and clouds are generated runtime using a mixture of perlin noise, voronoi maps, perturbation, bumpmapping and a bunch of other tricks.


Allegorithmic has some pretty impressive development going on, but I think procedurally generated content makes most sense for online distributed games like TT. I mean, why bother compressing a 4 GB AAA game to 1 GB when it still has to be distributed on a DVD? Then again, Valve's Steam concept might change that in the future...