3D Game Programming All in One (Course Technology PTR Game Development Series)

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Overview

In many games, having a full suite of character models, buildings, trees, and other visual clutter is still not enough to accomplish the needed sense of immersion. There are a number of other aspects to the game world that come from the world around us that we often take for granted: the background sky, the appearance of water, the appearance of clouds in motion, and the terrain. Figure 18.1 is a nice serene picture of ocean-side forested hills just after sunset. No, it's not a photograph—it's a screen shot from the game Tubettiworld being developed using the Torque Game Engine.

Figure 18.1: A serene scene.

Now way back in Chapter 12 we covered terrains to a certain extent, so you probably have a reasonable sense of what is involved with creating terrains using a height map. In this chapter we will revisit terrains using the more labor-intensive method of manually building up a terrain with the in-game editor. We'll get into that at the end of this chapter.

First, however, we will visit sky, clouds, and water—the environmental triad of computer game ambience.