simple TERRAIN?

Hi all!!
I would like to design a very simple Flight Simulator. I have a quite good understanding of C++ and a basic knowledge in OpenGL.
Now! the question is what sould be the first step to design a flight simulator. I don’t have a clue how to start it.
I thought about creating terrain first!? but I am sure its wrong!
Can anyone give me some clues?.

By the way does anyone know where I could find some good tutorials or sites on how to create Terrains from scratch with some code examples? or anyone have a source code taken from some book or something that has a very simple terrain that I could learn from. I just want to see how it works.
I have the red book but surprisingly there is nothing about it.
Thanks for any help!

For terrain you should check out http://www.vterrain.org . There is a wealth of info.

I would create the terrain as one entirely separate piece/program with an api for displaying a position and orientation. Then make your simulation as another plugin that pumps out these values. That way you can make as many different types of simulations as you wish: cars, tanks, airplanes, helicopters, and on and on.

I used to do this for a living. Simulation rules, software engineering sucks.

thanks so much Nickels! this link is very helpful!

Here is a good site for beginners, thanks to Tim Stirling for this website and tutorial! http://www.geocities.com/timstirling/land_eng/LandEng1.htm

I will ‘shortly’ be creating the third one that loads a heightmap and does a very simple quadtree type culling, has better texturing and contains simple per vertex lighting.

Thanks Tim! your tutorial is very helpful!
I can’t wait for the one you’ve just mentioned!

Hi !

I’m another beginner having similar problems.
I actually have an infinite terrain with sunlight and fog, but I don’t manage to enable backface culling ! When I simply write
glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE), it does not work !
Please Help !

Try this Jacob - http://www.cbloom.com/3d/techdocs/culling.txt

One more Question to all - Should I draw the wireframe for the whole area in one go? even if it is not visible? and then put the texture on the visible part?

Hi
Just enabling culling might not be enough.
You may need to specify a face to cull.
glCullFace(GL_BACK);
Try that command.

  • Dave