Google Maps meshes for Gamebryo....yup you read that right.

[Deleted152611273User]

Knowing that it's relatively easy to gather the meshes from Google maps into blender gave me the idea to implement more buildings into Fallout/TTW but I know have more questions...

 

Is there a engine limitation that prevents placing more objects? And if so is there a way to get around this issue?

 

What would be with the LOD generator?

 

(The buildings would be low low poly ofc in order to save performance)

[54yeg]

You can turn them into .RAW files that are black and white and the engine shall convert them to heightmaps!

[madmongo]

I'm not sure what you are trying to do here. A "world" in the gamebryo engine consists of a heightmap and objects. The heightmap isn't a mesh. It's a heightmap, with cells divided up into quads and each quad is then textured with multiple textures. If you create a mesh in Blender from google data, that's not going to help you at all with the landscape. Unless you know something I don't, in which case I'd like to hear how you plan on doing this.

 

You might be able to extract buildings from google data, but I suspect that they are going to be very crude and low-poly. That might be ok for distant objects but it's not going to work very well for any area that you want to actually walk through.

 

There are a few engine limitations that you are going to run into.

 

First, there seems to be a limit to how many objects that you can place into a cell. I have run into issues when automatically placing objects into regions. I don't know exactly where the limit is. I'm not sure if this is a GECK limit or an engine limit. I changed the way I was auto-generating objects so that it wouldn't overwhelm the GECK and then I never bothered looking any further into the issue.

 

Second, there is a 16 MB limit to mods. If you try to add landscape plus objects all in one mod, chances are you will exceed this limit and will permanently break your mod. You will need to set up your GECK in network mode instead of single user mode, and you will need to use Version Control to check in various bits of your mod so that each chunk is less than 16 MB. Usually if you check in your landscape first and then add objects in a later check-in you won't run into issues. I'm sure there is a limit to how many objects you can place into a mod but I haven't run into it yet.

 

Third, if you place objects too far in the X or Y directions it breaks the game. The physics engine in particular goes really haywire.

 

Fourth, it's a 32 bit game. The game can only access 2 GB of RAM by default. You can increase that to 4 with a patch, but that's as high as you can go (32 bits is 4 GB of address space). It doesn't matter how much RAM your PC has. The game can never access more than 4 GB. It's very easy to run the game completely out of memory using a lot of objects with different textures.

 

You can turn them into .RAW files that are black and white and the engine shall convert them to heightmaps!

 

I have seen procedures for doing that but I have never been able to make it work. The tools always crash when I try it. If you have a link to a WORKING set of instructions on how to do this I would like to see it.

[Deleted152611273User]

Thanks for the comments, I should explain first what my plan is and if it would be possible.

 

I read a lot about creating landscape and buildings from Google maps but I found another simple way and it's called BlenderGIS that recreates entire places in 3D.

 

I would cut out the real life area of what the Fallout 3 map is (Based of references I will link up later) and turn them to 3D, remove the landscape mesh and everything what's not needed. Compare the real life and game locations and remove/edit everything to make them fit(Because the game map is in reality much smaller) and then make further improvements etc. The base of my thread is the mysterious question if it would be possible to have multiple houses etc standing, there might be a limit but having a whole aircraft carrier (Rivet City) standing around gave me some hope.

 

(Gabs would still be there generated with the help of "NukeMap")