The demo You mention, Thomas, only shows bare terrain, no plants, no monsters, no players etc. (but shadows look very good). AFAIK terrain engine in CS works in very similar way to that presented in your example.

i am aware of the fact that it shows simple terrain. but the fact that it shows 160 square km@2.5m resolution is almost unbeliveable, and it sitill has high fps on a average pc.
bdw.. this ranger mk2 thing uses a modified way of SOAR means it re-calculates the entire terrain for EVERY frame. since CS-engine shows popping and few other small things i would guess it to be a ROAM-like which uses single terrain-patches with differnet detail-levels and frustum-like culling.
//edit
i just read in the CS-engine docu that it uses a 4-level static LOD together with splitting the terrain in blocks, each block with independend LOD/texture etc) the visibility calculation is quad-tree based
-so it is somewhat ROAM-like
... come to think about it.-collision detection on such a terrain could be quite a challange.. using the 8*10^9 terrain= bad idea. this cries for somehting else .. well dosent belong here.. sry about that.
//edit end

if you think about... if the terrain showed in the demo i mentioned would be UNoptimised you would have 8.192.000.000 triangles (no this is not a calculation error). i know my graca works still pretty decent with several 10 thausends (guess 40-60k are still ok for realtime) but not 8*10^9. reducing those a little further and you can add lots of trees and houses and players.

Relying that much on specific OpenGL extensions, would increase the hardware requirements further

doing this with vertex shader is something nice but even if you dont have it you could use a software fallback.
using shaders would allow those massive terrains without wastin any cpu power you could use for other calculations.
lightning and shadows.. well per pixel light.. i think you'll have a hard job finding a pc these days without support for this (even most office pc's could do that)

well i dont like to strech this thread. ... crystal space forum dosn't seem to be very active.
i still like to say that this algorithm is ways better and more efficient than the terrain-puzzle blizzard used for WoW or the current CS-terrain optimisation (although already ways those are better than no optimisation).
a mix between puzling and this method to archieve best possible performance would beat anything ever seen.
if anyone is further intrested i like him to join the diskussion on the crystalspace board.
this here is a wishlist and this thread is drifting to a technical discussion which has nothing to do with wishes at all,
best greetings
thommy

ps: waching the long video is realls worth
ps:ps: sry 4 the long post.. bad habbit of mine..

hi there,

my wish is a improved terrain renderer ( more precisely a better optimisation of the terrain before beeing rendered). my WHY reasons are:

-Performance : "having a terrain on screen let fps drops even on pretty good machines (on not so good even more, my 2ghz+gf4ti4k2 goes down to <15fps sometimes <7 )"
-can make the game more beautyful "would allow huge worlds with even more freedom where to go"
-might attract/inspire 3d-artists to contribute

optimisation is quite difficult i know(depending on used terrain-model-format even more, even if i am no programer i know about it, but a few month ago i found something intresting...).

my promised hint:
in case one of you programmers are intrested you should look at this one http://web.interware.hu/bandi/ranger.html.
even if you are not intrested it's worth looking at. 160x160km terrain while keeping 2.5m resolution+simple per pixel light on a today's mid-lower cost pc... realtime optimisation in perfection .. just add some npc's and vegetation
no joke i tested it! i ran the binary's via wine on my linux box, it IS working.
full source is given.
lizence is :"You can do whatever you want with the code, free of charge, but if you use it for something cool, I'd really love to know about it!"
side also contains nice documents on how this thing is working.

i'd love to hear what you are thinking about it.
greetings
thommy e

ps: i know terrain optimisation is not your main problem but it would be nice to have something like this =)
ps:ps:.. dunno how close this wishlist is connected with engine devellopment but it's a wish after all, if i'm wrong here please drop me a line.
ps:ps:ps: no i am not requesting 160x160km terrains  .

thx thx thx thx aaand thx again =) it worked! jay!!
great job.
-i just wonder y it won\'t use 3d acceleration. softwarerendering is quite laggy =D BUT it worked jip jip jip hooray.

never thougt that someone is able to make life so easy.

mixing up the different instalations didn\'t work
i tried everything but i keep getting this sprcal3d.so ( sprcal3d.0 ) error. can some in the dev team please check these files?
... i wonder y the install script works fine. can someone post the commands executed by this install script?
i think there is something which isn\'t documented in the gentoo/debian how-to
thx a lot

edit: found the commands i was looking for. please pray...

okay.. this is my 3rd day with some lovely PS-sources =)

i got the same error  messages while compiling
it skipped the file because of the plugin stuff?

 
..failed C++ ./out/linuxx86/debug/plugins/mesh/sprcal3d/object/sprcal3d.o ...
...skipped sprcal3d.so for lack of sprcal3d.o...

i really dont undestand it. the client was fine till the menue with the carackter creation. after linking the stuff like written in the gentoo&debian tut it just shows the startup-splash and hung up.

in the end i got this console output when i try to run the os client:

[root@localhost planeshift]# ./psclient
crystalspace.maploader: Could not get model converter
crystalspace.maploader: Could not get model crossbuilder
 ---some stuff aboutmy hardware and the engine an some deactivated LOG things--
crystalspace.pluginmgr.loadplugin:
  WARNING: could not load plugin \'cel.physicallayer\'
Couldn\'t load plugin for PlLayer.

i\'m really sorry for bothering you but i guess i am to stupid to solve this stuff myself =/

ps: sry 4 completly editing my post^^