Scaling down 45 …40km to 50 km size maritime routes to quarter scale.
Made a start with the Isle of Man route, remade with greyscale and srtm2 and will put it back online in a day or so.
45 routes made at about 40 to 45 km Solway to Thames but at full size and limited dissolve seabed. I am starting to remake them at quarter size and everything scaled down in proportion with ordinary seabed, so channels and sandbanks etc could be made. With the future changes to the game engine I think scaled down routes might be the better option?
I can leave the greyscale texture (png) in the download folder and you can experiment and make your own route…if any interest. I start from ‘mage as plane’ (one meter) then subdivide 8 times exactly which make 66,000 vertices approx) 9 times would make about 260,000 and possibly lock up computer. This I scale up to the full size to match the route full square size… (Change 1 in scale boxes to 0.25), scaling down starting with terrain at 66,000 vertices then to reduce ‘everything’ to about quarter size approx.
Only takes a few minutes to create the routes from greyscale. Modifier/displace then enter UV in box and name of the greyscale in the other two boxes. ( also needs in triangle tab, type of acitive date to display… the uv greyscale name). Then finish with apply or it collapses.
Barry
changing working scale provideds no benefit in regards to precision issues.
Hi Barry, the problem with large simulations is when you have small numbers like 1cm interacting with large numbers (50KM is 5,000,000cm). Floating point precision can’t deal with this so you get glitches in physics and rendering. http://www.cygnus-software.com/papers/comparingfloats/Comparing%20floating%20point%20numbers.htm
You could try to balance your smallest unit (the size of a boat should be 10-20m right?) with the size of your map, so that there’s not too much difference between the two. But even so, the fact that your boat represents just 0.04% of the total map may cause problems.
There are methods for loading terrain from disk around the player so that at any time you’re only within a 5km chunk of terrain (that’s similar to the distance to the horizon when at sea). As you move near the edge of this chunk the extra terrain is loaded and others are deleted. I suggest looking in to these methods if you want your simulation to be uninterrupted by loading screens.
Thanks for the replies. More food for thought. Maybe best then for me return to the 20km size as have made 16 routes at that size river Ribble to Portmadog. Not too bothered about a realistic sailing simulator as I think it would need more than Blender for that. If the scaling does not apply to the inner workings of Blender maybe best to keep to 20 to 25 km size max. as previous and start putting them back online with the working canal locks etc.
The scaled basic Isle of Man I have just put online made from greyscale.
Will leave it online until I start to put the 20km approx routes back online and forget the larger routes.
Not using cabin view from boat just drivable and roaming camera.
Barry
So I will forget the larger size routes 25km to 50km and start to put back online…slowly for download15km to 25m maritime routes. However my routes are more about the past ages and bygone times and not a sailing simulator as such. I think a proper sailing simulator would need more than Blender and also needs interest from others.
Barry
Maritime routes if/when available will be detailed in completed games forum, for lack of simulations forum for real life simulations of present and past times.
As the use of Blender seems neglected as regards real life simulations, decided these forums are unsuitable for my interests. No further downloads will available from my site, unless of course there is a growing interest in an open source sailing simulator. I will be expanding the descriptive pages with mini screenshots as regards coastal UK, probably of the past ages and bygone times, based on Blender content.
I post on the UK train simulator site in the maritime simulations and Blender forums section on UKTS site. My thanks to those people who responded with useful advice.
http://www.barrygandsw.co.uk/intro01.html
Barry