I’ve been quietly developing mapspinner for a while now, and momoko_fan suggested I upload a screenshot.
Since I cant see the capcha on the screenshots page, heres a forum post 
You will find the discussion at:
http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=9880.0
Momoko_Fan does not always think that far. Personally, I would recommend many screenshots! ;D
This looks fantastic my man. Once I have access to the screenshot section of the site I'm gonna ask you to put together a few showcase shots if you don't mind
Here’s a screen shot of my branch. I paint the textures with a low res paint program and map each painted color to any texture images I want. The mini-map at top-left shows whether terrain blocks are loaded, whether they are unsewn (Z), and the frustum cull state (X for partial, O for excluded). The map also shows the 2 online (realtime networked) players (red and yellow dots).
Unfortunately, the shot doesn’t show the high res of the terain tiles, because I currently have a problem in that the camera is several meters above the surface. (If you look, you can tell that both avatars are a couple meters in the air). Would be easy to fix, but I am tied up with unrelated, nasty problems.
It’s interesting to turn the camera and see the map update, showing newly visible area being un-culled.
Coming along nicely!
These snaps use roughly 250kb of terrain data.
You sculpt all of this in real-time right? A video might not be a bad idea 
I would love to, but I'll have to wait untill I could affor the upload (I am poor)
lanmower said:Afford the upload? You're saying your video would (is) exceeed the 2gb/10min limit? Also, is there actually a way to go beyond that? I've looked around quite a bit, and haven't found any sign of there being any sort of 'premium subscription' available for YouTube right now, except if you're some kind of partner of course.
I would love to, but I'll have to wait untill I could affor the upload (I am poor) :)
Might wanna consider Vimeo. I have a Plus account there, so I can upload anything you'd like then pass the video-ownership on to you (will bring this 'offer' to the greater public once I know my limitations better) as long as you find a way to upload the file elsewhere first, which might prove just as tricky if we're dealing with several GBs... I believe DropBox will let you upload 2 gigs for free though, and you can use the desktop uploader if you want which might speed things up.
lanmower mentioned before that he has had limited bandwidth because he lives on some deserted island with a volleyball.
SomethingNew said:
lanmower mentioned before that he has had limited bandwidth because he lives on some deserted island with a volleyball.
hahaha
This is africa baby theres wild animals everywhere…
SomethingNew said:
lanmower mentioned before that he has had limited bandwidth because he lives on some deserted island with a volleyball.
LOL, no offense to lawnmower... I think you're doing fantastic work on this, but that is too funny. Seriously though, It's really coming along nicely!
Well thats what this thread is all about, getting mapspinners concept noticed. I think its achieving just that…
My next update will include the abilaty to save jme scenegraphs into your terrain blocks, so that anything from a tree to a skyscraper can be added and saved with a block of terrain… I suspect this will make spatial indexing for models really simple since its actually included in the blocks indexing.
Keep at the good work
You may think forward to designing the quad tree that you implement. Look at taking advantage of VBO or locking, bear in mind that animated spatials hate locking ( you cannot animate unless you unlock - animate - then lock). Seems a contender for an unlocked node and a locked node from each block to form your quad tree.
Further, floats get rather inaccurate the larger they get, this will be evident the further away a spatial is from the world origin. To avoid this you might need to reallign the world position at zero while maintaing what the universe postion is. this can be aided by a simple refernce system on the blocks - eg a tree is at block x/y and point x/y within that block…
From recent research there are still alot of comps out there with max 2 textures, may be worth looking at other options …
If none of this has made any sense, its because i have just got home from a night out
Max 2 textures cards? I dont think they would run this pixel shader anyway… though I'm not sure, if someone wants to support something older than a 6-series geforce (its cheaper to buy a motherboard with a geforce 6150le than buying the 512mb ddr-1 such an old system needs to run java games properly) they are more than welcome to modify the shader for two textures, the datasets are made to save only 2 textures if only two layers are used. I am looking at moving forward, not back.
I dont use quad trees, I use linear spatial indexing with the blocks around you stored in a map. Its way fast enough.
I do take advantage of VBO's thats the whole point of mapspinner, fast and relatively dynamic terrain.
Thanks for mentioning the the float problem though, I'll have to look into that. Its possible to store and offset number in the manager and keep the world at 0 but I'll do that later in development after all the features I want is implemented, I'm working on adding models first, then doing some other work on maloader.
If you wish to comment on the implementation of a terrain system, I suggest a better place to put such comments to be the discussion thread. If you wish to comment on the screenshots, this is a good place.
Also, I would appreciate it if people sampled the performance of this system and compared it to the alternatives before suggesting ways to speed it up, mapspinner is currently smooth as a babies bottom and fast as a fart out of hell. I would likely slow it down by using recursive objects like quadtrees for instance.