Skip to content
Hallway
0:00 / 0:00

#halowars#terrainrendering#lod

The Terrain of Halo Wars

GDC Festival of Gaming

555K subscribers • 66 videos on Hallway • Conference channel

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2024.
  • Presented by Colt McAnlis, developer at Ensemble Studios
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 9 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

16K views9 years ago2 recommendations

Game developmentGraphics and audioUnity, Unreal and GodotRendering

Colt McAnlis explains how Ensemble Studios built and optimized the terrain rendering system for the console strategy game Halo Wars.

In this classic 2009 GDC session, former Microsoft Ensemble Studios developer Colt McAnlis provides a programming-driven look at how the legendary strategy game company build the terrain for a console strategy game like Halo Wars. GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives. Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/Official_GDC Check out our Facebook page for GDC exclusives facebook.com/GameDevelopersConference Visit our site: ubm.io/2ctNvqZ

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a classic reference for terrain rendering, heightmaps, and level-of-detail techniques in game engines.

u/corysamain r/GraphicsProgramming • Recommends

On “Progressive Meshes (PM) vs Height-Map Specific LOD control”

…ade sense to cut down on GPU triangle API calls. But, then geometry data moved to GPU RAM and the cost of modifying it became prohibitive. Almost everyone used 2 or 3 pre-baked LOD meshes as their entire LOD system for general meshes. Terrains are a special case. So, they got some special handling. For example: The terrain rendering of Halo Wars link to this video However, these days GPUs have advanced enough that a successor to progressive meshes is having a hay day/ Unreal's Nanite breaks up a mesh into small chunks (meshlets). Then does it's own form of LOD in and across those chunks. https://www.highperformancegraphics.org/slides22/Journey_to_Nanite.pdf link to this video The meshlet approach is becomin…
3View on Reddit

u/mysticredditin r/gameenginedevs • Recommends

On “"3-layer height fields" for Terrain?”

May also be of interest: * How Ensemble Studios crafted the terrain of Halo Wars
2View on Reddit

u/corysamain r/GraphicsProgramming • Recommends

On “Height map and terrain splatting”

More ideas: link to this video
2View on Reddit