Over 160 Tutorial Videos Created For Unreal Dev Kit 48
As a follow-up to Epic Games' release of a free version of the Unreal Engine last month, the company has now posted over 160 video tutorials which demonstrate the various uses of the Unreal Development Kit. Roughly 20 hours of footage were created by technical education company 3D Buzz, with topics ranging from user interface to game physics to cinematics.
Re:Terrain generator? Aerodynamics? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember reading a 90s published book "3D game design" which walks through (in 2000 pages) the creation of an 3D FPS shooter.
The terrain generator described inthere, is just a grid with random height vertices, smoothed with interpolation and stored in a grayscale bitmap to represent the "height variation". The parser of this bitmap hence could also be fed by a simple image in which you drew your landscape's height variation and overlay a texturemap.
For this you just need to be able to draw vertices and creative use of randomized numbers.
But for todays high-res gamedesign, I think there are more involving techniques needed...
Terrain generator? Use fractal landscapes! (Score:4, Interesting)
But seriously read more about fractal landscapes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_landscape [wikipedia.org]
Re:Terrain generator? Use fractal landscapes! (Score:2, Interesting)
Ahh, the random midpoint displacement algorithm. Thanks for pointing out that neat thing they do this century. Mind you, it's genuinely cool stuff, and you shouldn't be less excited about it just because other people were excited about it previously. But that "soooo 90's" is pretty damn funny, since what you're describing is probably the same thing the OP is talking about, and it is actually... soooo 80's.
At least, I wrote a little program to play with it in 1991 after reading about it in a book published in the late 80s.