Hide Terrain by code

[vblack]

I'm doing a fps game and for optimisation (entering into a building), I need to hide the terrain entirely with a script. How to do that ? Can't find a 'terrain' object I can manipulate.

[Josh]

The renderer will automatically hide parts of terrain that are not visible.

[vblack]

The problem is that we have a basement in that building and the terrain is sometimes visible (overlapping walls), we try to extrude, but hiding the whole would be better.

 

[Josh]

Ah, that makes sense.

Do this once after your map is loaded to get the terrain entity:

local n
for n=0,world:CountEntities()-1 do
	local entity = world:GetEntity(n)
	if entity:GetClassName()=="Terrain" then
		terrain = entity
		break
	end
end

 

[Genebris]

1 hour ago, Josh said:

Ah, that makes sense.

Do this once after your map is loaded to get the terrain entity:

local n
for n=0,world:CountEntities()-1 do
	local entity = world:GetEntity(n)
	if entity:GetClassName()=="Terrain" then
		terrain = entity
		break
	end
end

terrain:Hide() removes collision from terrain, but it remains visible.

[Josh]

4 minutes ago, Genebris said:

terrain:Hide() removes collision from terrain, but it remains visible.

That's actually going to be a problem, even if I fix that.  You don't want all your objects outside to fall out of the level.

The reason this occurs is that technically each terrain patch is its own entity, and is not parented to the terrain entity itself.

[Genebris]

5 minutes ago, Josh said:

That's actually going to be a problem, even if I fix that.  You don't want all your objects outside to fall out of the level.

The reason this occurs is that technically each terrain patch is its own entity, and is not parented to the terrain entity itself.

But how do you disable rendering of terrain then? You can do this, but I guess it won't help performance-wise.

 

[Josh]

4 minutes ago, Genebris said:

But how do you disable rendering of terrain then? You can do this, but I guess it won't help performance-wise.

Well, at this point you don't.

What the user needs is for me to add another terrain tool to remove patches of the terrain.

[gamecreator]

Which relates to a previous need to remove navmesh patches/triangles.  Kinda

[Rick]

Couldn't a shader just not draw the terrain while still having it physically in place?

[Crazycarpet]

Couldn't you set the entities alpha to 0? It' be nice if the renderer didn't even try to draw entities with an alpha color of 0.

[nick.ace]

@Rick This won't help much with performance (and can actually worsen performance). You aren't saving CPU processing due to draw calls/state changes being made, and you still have to go through vertex shading, tessellation, geometry shading (unless you discard here, but you get geometry shader overhead), and rasterization. If you discard in the fragment shader (because the terrain quads are too large or something), then you compromise early-z discard, which is a GPU hardware optimization that prevents fragment shaders from running. In fact, if you are rendering terrain and drawing it last, it can be faster allowing it to render normally than trying to discard it in a shader.

[Jazz]

Was playing with terrain the other day for fun so I put it in the workshop. It's too bad not all the terrain commands are working/exposed to lua.

" terrainCutter.lua Lowers terrain the size of the model/CSG it's attached to. terrainRemove.lua lowers it when you enter the model's AABB then restores it when not in it's AABB. "

https://www.leadwerks.com/workshopitem?tags=&queryType=1&fileType=0&fileid=938356115

[vblack]

On ‎6‎/‎5‎/‎2017 at 11:53 AM, SGB said:

Was playing with terrain the other day for fun so I put it in the workshop. It's too bad not all the terrain commands are working/exposed to lua.

" terrainCutter.lua Lowers terrain the size of the model/CSG it's attached to. terrainRemove.lua lowers it when you enter the model's AABB then restores it when not in it's AABB. "

https://www.leadwerks.com/workshopitem?tags=&queryType=1&fileType=0&fileid=938356115

The workshop is not working for this page (got 4.3 version). Can you put the script ? I can find the entity "Terrain" as explained, but cannot control it (Hide(), Move() doesn't work)

[Jazz]

TerrainCutter.zip

[vblack]

Hi;

In  TerrainRemove.lua, tSize and terrain are undefined ?

[Jazz]

1 minute ago, vblack said:

Hi;

In  TerrainRemove.lua, tSize and terrain are undefined ?

They are defined in Main.lua

[vblack]

OK, tried the code, but it doesn't work, when I go inside, it just flicker and the terrain is still visible

[Jazz]

53 minutes ago, vblack said:

OK, tried the code, but it doesn't work, when I go inside, it just flicker and the terrain is still visible

Here's a compiled version to try.

terraintest.rar · 23.58 MB

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0wbgdtz1huytp4d/terraintest.rar?dl=0