Pondering on the best approach for a virtual town. Something like Mario Sunshine or Rome
The town should have tiled paths, plaza's, little flat lawn areas, a road and other decorations. …
Buildings can then be added to the rendered floor
pondering of using terrain pages initially with a heightmap - building the floor image by overlaying images on top of the main textureimage, but to get the detail and effect of size this may require too much memory ???.
One though is to build something similar to terrain page but use quads instead of terrain blocks, rendering the quads with composed floor images - will vastly cut down on the number of indices.
Any ideas ???
Just rendered 81 quads with unique textures on - each texture was 256*256.
Was able to draw a path from East to West using a dirty rendering hack. ?? Anyone know of any potential issues in what im doing ??
The image file produced was over 500kb, which is way larger than needed. Would it be better to build the town from the ground up each time by loading in a model ??? rather than trying to pre - render the floor detail. This would mean that each path tile ( maybe 40 of them ) would be its own quad, but the texture would only be sent to the graphics card once.
? Treat it as a shared mesh maybe ??
?? would it be better to have more smaller quads to assist culling - should i use a clod mesh for LOD ???
Just so many way to get to the same outcome
Ditched dynamic image rendering and opted for reusing textures on flat boxes, using a grid system to place the box.
Managed to get layers ie - ground, then a path on top and grass on top of the ground on the path by using the z of the box set to .01f.
Now for the buildings and fountains…
Rules of jME forum, any time you get something working, a screenshot is required… anytime things are broken, keep it quiet 
The new Passes interface will allow you to do the whole path/grass/ground layers thing without the .1 z kludge… Keep an eye out!
yay, nice
ill be ready for screen shots in about 2 weeks - have about 3 completely different scenes so far within the game, only another 8 to do… lol
Hoping for alpha around xmas - networking is done - with exception of udp
Did you manage to progress with the passes interface
alpha version is in CVS (RenderPass and ShadowRenderPass). BasicPassManager as well.
Fantastic, is there any part of it in particular that is in known development, or is it all free for experimentation ??
BTW, does this BB allow uploading of images or does it require a URL. Scanned through the help, couldnt see an attachments option
You can attach by opening up the Additional Options section at the bottom.
The Pass stuff is under fairly heavy development, but you are free to play with it. 
The interfaces shouldn't be changing much, if that's what you are asking.
Additional options for me are :-
Notify me of replies.
Return to this topic.
Don't use smileys.
ill look to see what web space i have
Hmmm interesting, perhaps it doesn't allow you to send attachments until you reach a certain post count? I looked all through the attachments set up and didn't seem anything preventing users from sending attachments.
If you can find any webspace, feel free to e-mail me something, I can host a few files for you if you wish.
Alas, I cannot send attachments either. I'm running SMF also, so I'll dig around also and see if I can figure out how to enable it.
darkfrog