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| denti |
 Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:19 am Post subject: Grome and Realm crafter |
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Joined: 14 Oct 2008
Posts: 5
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Hello,
We are 3, working on a project with the engine Realm crafter, your software is one that seems most interesting to make our map, but we don't know how export take place in realm crafter ?
Have you already customer using grome and realm crafter ?
What are the export formats?
We are not commercially oriented, we only want to make a game to play with friends, as the standard version is more in our price, I would like to know what size (km x km) represents a map of 4 sectors?
thank you for your answers 
sorry for my English, we're French  |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:36 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hello,
I don't know the exact support RealmCrafter has for terrain. Grome can export to the following formats:
Heightmaps:
- 16 bit raw
- 16 bit png
- COLLADA
- DTED (comming up)
Images (layers masks and textures):
- jpg
- dds
- png
- bmp
- tga
- sgi
- geotiff (comming up)
It can also export to OpenSceneGraph, Torque
So if RealmCrafter supports terrain it must be able to import from 16 bit raws (most common format for heightmaps). Problems may be at the terrain image layers. There are two methods here:
1. Multiple layers support. You may need to create a special shader to represent multiple layers applied on top of each other. Realmcrafter may already support this so all you need to do is to take the exported masks and their tiles images and render them in the correct order.
Simple text exporter from Grome can help you here. It writes a human readable text with the layers order, their images, texture coordinates etc.
2. Create high resolution images so you cover your terrain with a single image. This is suitable for terrain engines that can load textures in chunks streaming them from disk. Don't know if Realm Crafter support this.
You may also consider contacting Realmcrafter team. I know that there was some interest from there to support Grome integration.
As for the standard produce scenes size... really depends on your scale. With Standard you can export 4 zones of 512 tiles each. A tile is the distance between two vertices so, if for example you choose 2 meters between 2 vertices (which is a good resolution for a RPG/shooter) you have in total 2 by 2 km. You can also work with multiple Grome scenes and assemble them in your game or using the Grome SDK.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| denti |
| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 9:17 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 14 Oct 2008
Posts: 5
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thanks for your answer
If I understand well, with standard edition I can make 4 sectors zone and assemble it in grome sdk to make a big zone ?
I'm not a map specialist, as my questions can show it  , but it's seem to me that if I import in realm crafter engine a heightmap with color map, resolution will decrease instead of imported mesh with texture ?
maybe I'm wrong ?
thank for your help in my understanding and in my choice
About the realm crafter team it's difficult to have information about grome integration, but if it develops would be good news for us |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 9:29 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hello,
Even if you have 4 zones in Grome you can choose to export them as a single one using the Grome SDK. Also, what I was referring was that, you can create an import/export plugin pair that can take two of your scene zones save them, and replace them with another two. In this way even if you have only 4 zones inside the editor at one time, on the disk, you can have a bigger map. You will just be forced to use 4 at a time. So, for example, in order to match the borders of the zones, you can work like this:
- have 4 zones in memory
- export (save) the left 2, leaving the 2 on the right in memory
- create or import (load) another 2 on the right of the scene
- work on the new 4 zones
- continue the process with other 2 zones
In this way, using import/export you can simulate the Grome swap system which is present only in Professional edition.
Using a heighmap has nothing to do with color map resolution. For color map you can use either multilayers or one big resolution image. The former case may be feasible if your engine supports such a feature (some like a megatexture).
Realm crafter has a big community that would benefit from this kind of integration. I'm sure if many of the community members will ask for this, the engine developer may consider working with us. I actually know the main person behind RealmCrafter and I will ask him what kind of resources he can put into this.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| denti |
| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 9:40 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 14 Oct 2008
Posts: 5
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thank you again for your response, I better understood how make larger map with your technique
I will talk with other members of my team
I hope you right about the involvement of realm crafter team in the integration of Grome, because really from all tested demo, your software seems to us, to be the best. |
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| denti |
| Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 9:02 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 14 Oct 2008
Posts: 5
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just another question about something that we don't understand
in Grome we can place objects, buildings, trees ... but with heigtmap export, these items can't be exported to our engine?
thank you in advance for your answers always constructive and interesting |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 9:19 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hello, yes heightmaps are for terrain only (they represent 2D grids with elevation information). Objects on the other hand are defined as templates (geometry meshes) which are instantiated in multiple places on the map (instances of the template, which are moved, rotated, scaled on the map). You can have multiple instances of the same template.
Grome SDK can be used to create plugins to read geometry templates from any format (custom developed formats are browsed, visualized and used as any native format). Out-of-the-box Grome comes with support to read from COLLADA which is pretty much a standard (many 3D modelers can save to collada, including 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, XSI, modo). So you can use COLLLADA replacements for your format when creating objects in Grome and in your game use your own formats. Torque exporter functions in this way (collada objects are used inside Grome, at export the names of the templates are written, when loading to Torque the engine native meshes are loaded, which have the same name as their Collada replacements).
Grome SDK offers information about the templates and instances. So you can write an exporter to save the templates information and where are their instances on the map. Out-of-the-box Grome can export to a simple to parse text format so you can either read from this format or create a new export plugin to save to your format (to RealmCrafter scene format).
I hope this information helps. If you plan to create export/import to/from RealmCrafter please don't hesitate to contact us for support. We are more than happy to create integration with as many engines as possible. |
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| denti |
| Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 9:39 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 14 Oct 2008
Posts: 5
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thank you for your prompt and detailed response , if we decide to Grome, we will surely work to create a format suitable for export to Realm crafter and then we will contact you for some help .
For now we expect to see that it's th best to use as map editor Realm crafter pro, because this is the version that interest and not the standard version of rc with dx7 engine.(realm crafter have two version, one in dx7 and pro one with dx9) |
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| Giuliani |
| Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 8:13 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 04 Aug 2009
Posts: 3
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hello,
RealmCrafter professional version is now released (3D engine based on irrlicht)
Do you think that it could be possible to create a format to make Grome compatible with RC?
I know that Grome II is released too, and I think it could be the best terrain editor for our project.
I have read the discussion beyond, but the export of heightmap is not very comfortable to work with, because we have to compressed the texture and so in game the result is not very good.
It seems that in the past you have had some contacts with the members of the solstar team ton integrate a plug-in of Grome in RC.
What about the future?
Thanks in advance for your answer. |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 9:12 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hello,
We do have plans to offer support for as many engines as possible (RealmCrafter being one of them) but I cannot promise you a certain date for that engine.
We've made a dedicated engines support page here:
http://www.quadsoftware.com/index.php?m=section&sec=product&subsec=editor&target=editor_engines
As you can see the next updates will be for Ogre3D and 3D Game Studio, while RealmCrafter is in the to-do list. We did have some talks with RealmCrafter people but that was long time ago and they were very busy with the new engine version at that time. Hopefully we can restart the talks with them.
In the mean time, you do have the Grome SDK at your disposal. With this SDK a programmer can easily create export plugins to any engine supporting terrain rendering. I will be more than happy to assist you in this task.
Best Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| Giuliani |
| Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 9:14 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 04 Aug 2009
Posts: 3
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Thank you for your fast answer.
I will wait ^^ |
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| Finstern |
| Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 11:59 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 09 Mar 2010
Posts: 24
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I'm not a programmer at all so I cannot help personnaly on this one but here is what we find on the rc pro wiki about importing plugins'
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Custom Import Plugins
It is possible to create your own plugins for RCT using .NET DLLs. You can download a sample plugin which creates a blank terrain from here: Sample RCTPlugin.zip
The solution will open with Visual Studio 8/9 (2005/2008) in all editions, including express. After opening the project you will need to add a new reference. This is to "RCTPlugin.dll" which will be in the "Realm Crafter 2" folder of your Realm Crafter installation. The plugin DLL provides all of the necessary interfaces for terrain imports. It is possible to re-create this project in other .NET/CLR based languages (including VB.NET). However, our documentation and support only relates to C#.
The source file is commented to demonstrate the important code areas and how they affect the editor. It is possible to include additional forms and classes to carry out whatever task you require, providing that you return from the Import method eventually! |
I hope it can help ?
That would be one of the best thing I heard for grome improvment (well I bought it in the intent of working with grome as terrain base editor for rc pro ..  ) |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 12:14 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi,
Thank you for the additional information. Yes, a programmer can use that sample to import from a format Grome already saves directly into RC. So for example a programmer can use that sample and modify it to import from the simple text exporter format Grome produces into the RC.
An alternative is to have developed a Grome plugin to export directly into RC format.
We will have a look over the possibilities but first we have other important tasks to be completed (new features for Grome) so I cannot give you a certain deadline. Anyway, a team with a programmer in it can easily create a Grome export plugin to save data to any engine that has decent terrain support. We are more than happy to offer you support for that.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| Finstern |
| Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 2:32 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 09 Mar 2010
Posts: 24
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| That's an excellent new, thank you ALicu. |
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| Giuliani |
| Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2010 7:07 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 04 Aug 2009
Posts: 3
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| Thanks for the answers to both of you ^^ |
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