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Dec 5, 2003, 3:09pm

Has anyone run into an issue where complex terrain texturing
causes the terrain in AW to exhibit missing, broken and mangled
polygons?

When I say complex, I mean terrain that has a lot of adjacent
changes in the textures. It's difficult to create such a terrain using
any of the standard bots, but if you use dem2rwx and you put
in many many zones that are spaced very close in altitude you
can create one.

If you contrive a terrain that is very rough so it has a lot of
closely spaced altitude changes, it is also easier to cause a lot
of texture transitions using dem2rwx.

If you create a very simple terrain that is perfectly flat, but it
changes the texture so no two adjacent cells use the same one...
kaboom!

If you create a very complex terrain with regard to the altitudes,
but keep the number of texture transitions down, then everything
works fine.

Dec 5, 2003, 3:29pm

Copy of email sent to AW support:

It is possible to break the AW terrain by creating a terrain with a very
irregular texturing pattern that contains no large areas of solid patterns.

The size of the terrain doesn't make much difference.

The number of textures also does not make much difference. I can break
the terrain by using just two textures and a perfectly flat heightfield if I
simply alternate the textures so that there are never two of the same
texture adjacent.

Quick experimentation shows that it is possible to texture roughly
two thirds of a given terrain 'page' like this as long as about one
third of the page is textured with the same value in each 'node'.

The method of uploading the terrain does not matter.

After producing a terrain that is broken, if I then upload a simple terrain
with no complex texturing into an area of the terrain that was OK, the
area of the map that was broken will then display correctly. I believe
this illustrates that your servers are storing the terrain properly, and
that the problem is in the browser.

[View Quote]

Dec 23, 2003, 7:01pm

Further to this issue, I've managed (by accident) to create terrains
that actually crash the browser.

If anyone else has had trouble crashing the browser when creating
complex terrains, please let me know how you were creating the
terrain.

[View Quote]

Dec 23, 2003, 10:56pm

[View Quote] > Further to this issue, I've managed (by accident) to create terrains
> that actually crash the browser.
>
> If anyone else has had trouble crashing the browser when creating
> complex terrains, please let me know how you were creating the
> terrain.

As far as I recall - textures 62+0x80, 0xc0,0x40 and texture 63+0x40,0c80 and 0xc0 caused the browser to crash reagularly.

--
Andras
"It's MY computer" (tm Steve Gibson)

Dec 23, 2003, 11:16pm

Yes... I'm avoiding those ones hopefully. I will put in some more
checks though.

[View Quote]

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