After spending about 3 hours staring at the open wilerness of Australia, I began to wonder how this would be possible to replicate in the GE. So, first thing I noticed was light. It wasn’t a simple splotch of light just sitting in one spot, as the clouds moved, so did it. That could be done with IPOs to ever-so-slightly change the stregnth and position of the light. Next were shadows, believe it or not, the world doesn’t look like it has these immensly complicated shadows that create these shiny bumps, so I guess that would be to do with the size of the bump map (done with python.) Also, the way things become a light blue colour in the background. Could that be done wih IPOs and near sensors, or maybe python? At any rate, I thought I might post my thoughts so I could get some insight as to how you could as realisticaly as possible mimic outdoors in GE.
Humm some people have created pretty nice outdoor scenes with blender so indeed it could be possible. Basically you have to create a very large terrain and use a single sunlight for it. Then you would have to bake a big shadow map for the terrain. Those are the things that come into my mind. Realistic day/night cycles would be pretty difficult to make I think…
Yeah, you might need alot of IPOs. I can’t even imagine how crazy the inards of a day-night cycle would look.
GE is only good for low detailed terrain. One color tex and two details, vertex-lit, and a shader considering alpha-channels to control detail textures. Maybe we could improve s.th. with bumpmaps. But in realtime we will have a problem with the vertcount. Terrains easily exceed 40.000 polys. I wish it were possible to incorporate something like this: http://web.interware.hu/bandi/ranger.html
You can have quite large terrain if you separate it to reasonable sized chunks. Say you have 100 000 poly terrain and you divide it to ten 10 000 poly meshes. Adjust camera clipping so that only one or two meshes are visible at one time. Nevertheless thousands of unnecessary polys will be rendered, because BGE doesn’t have terrain lod.
do we have access to face visibility through python and are invisible faces less expensive then visible?
Maybe you can use owner.getMesh().getVertex().setRGBA() to set alpha to 0 but I don’t think it affects performance. It would also be very cumbersome to use such a script to control face visibility.