| Submitted by , posted on 01 February 2002 |

Image Description, by These are screenshots of a project I've been working on for over two years now. I wanted to learn 3D programming and so I wrote a little 3D engine which I used to create a simple terrain renderer. The landscape renderer evolved over time and I stuffed it with more and more features. Only recently I began adding game elements like enemies, weapons and sound. These features are still experimental and relatively quick hacks.
The upper picture has a bit of game action in front of a nice panorama view. You can see an enemy flying towards us that has just been hit by a missile.
The lower picture displays the CLOD triangle mesh and the texture tiling.
Terrain renderer features include:

> - Continuous Level of Detail (CLOD) using a binary triangle tree (based on the technique discussed at http://www.longbowdigitalarts.com/seumas/progbintri.html)
> - complete texturing using a combination of unique texturing (one big texture for a terrain patch) and a tile-based approach.
> - recently added: ground fog (used for enhanced visual quality and also speed improvement)

Other features include:

> - a skybox for the clouds
> - a Wavefront .obj loader for the models
> - an enemy AI that makes the enemies look almost intelligent ... against rocks
> - a font renderer using font textures made with glfont by Brad Fish

The program was developed in C++ under Linux. So far this is the only platform it works on, but porting should be relatively easy since I used only portable libraries:

> - SDL for basic system access and input
> - OpenGL for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (Direct3D support should also be possible once I have made a Windows port, since I use my own 3D engine)
> - OpenAL for hardware-accelerated 3D sound
> - SigC++ for advanced inter-object communication

My ultimate goal is to create a modern version of the 80's classics Carrier Command and Midwinter, featuring enhanced graphics and gameplay. Multiplayer maybe.
The only problem is that I will never be able to do that alone so I will eventually release the game as Open Source.
As I haven't made a Windows port until now, only Linux users will be able to try the demo at:
http://www.student.uni-augsburg.de/~eschenjo/landscape-demo.tar.bz2
I hope you can get it to run. It depends on OpenGL and SDL 1.2.
Check it out! And please report any bugs you find. I know there are some.
Oh yes, as you probably noticed, my project is still lacking a decent name (I called it "landscape" but that doesn't sound very nice...)
Have fun,
Jonas Eschenburg

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