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[Valid_Dark]

You really aren't helping as much as you might think you are.

[Skyrunner]

Do you know the rule one of programming questions?

Rule one is "post code you actually has problems with." :/

[Valid_Dark]

I had problems with it yesterday, then I sent it to you, then today someone asked if I could post it in here, so I posted the current version of it,

[Skyrunner]

So... I'm making an erosion simulation. Right now, I'm using 2D bitmap graphics. I wonder if there is an easy way to draw terrain, then water on it, in 3D. I don't think I want to invest the time needed to learn DirectX from the ground up and implement water myself. Are there any easy tools that do those two things? One, render a heightmap. Two, render water on the heightmap.

[GalenEvil]

How 3D do you want it? You could make a pseudo-3D view if you want the camera to be stationary without much issues. Water could just be a colored and slightly translucent plane, or can be faked pretty well by applying a depth based coloring to any parts of the heightmap that are below water.

[Skyrunner]

It needs to be pretty, and it needs to be able to show me how much water there is. xD The problem I'm having is that I can't intuit how much water there is on a pixel (=cell), even with interpolating between a dark blue and a light blue based on height :/

Incidentally, how do you make it transparent/translucent? Multiplying doesn't work that awesomely, nor does adding. >.>

[GalenEvil]

You might be able to do it by alpha blending with the water to make it translucent. WaterColorBlend = ColorOfTerrain + WaterColor.RGB * WaterColor.Alpha. This may or may not be what you were doing already. You are wanting to be able to visually determine the height of water at any point without needing to keep a reference?

Do you have a picture that you could throw up for your 2D?

[MagmaMcFry]

BlendedColor = TerrainColor * (1 - WaterOpacity) + WaterColor * WaterOpacity

Fix'd.

[GalenEvil]

Knew I was missing a step! Thank you MagmaMcFry! ^_^

[MagmaMcFry]

Knew I was missing a step! Thank you MagmaMcFry! ^_^

*blushes*

Also, why the fuck does MSVC++ use four whole gigabytes of drive space? What does an IDE need that space for?

[GalenEvil]

I expect it's all of the libraries and misc. files, but then again it is a Microsoft product so what do you expect*? I'm tempted to try and throw MSVC++ onto ramdisk and see if it works, and see if there is any change in compile times. I do think it is probably the always present 'feature' of MSBloat v.Always.To.Much.01.b
MSVC++ (+) Windows SDK (+) DirectX SDK = Bloattasticalness... though doing dx work is fuuuuun when it works, and equally infuriating when it doesn't heh.

*disclaimer: I use Microsoft products so am not bashing from a fanboyish hatred of them, just their stuff has a tendency to be bloated for no reason

[Soadreqm]

I want to print some special characters with the Windows console, using C#. Specifically, Greek capital letter Phi. And it didn't work. At first, I thought it was some kind of stupid character encoding issue, but even after replacing the characters in my code with unicode code points cast to chars, and fiddling with the Console.OutputEncoding property, they were still printing wrong. It appears that the default Terminal font that came with my Windows 7 simply does not have Greek letters! Wrong code page, I guess.

I don't like either Consolas or Lucida Console, the other two available-by-default fonts, but I found this replacement Terminal font that apparently has all the characters. All of them. Or at least the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, loads of accented characters and box drawing.

My question is, if I ever end up sharing this piece of shit with anyone else, what can I do about the font situation? Should I make some kind of installer to install the font and edit the registry to make it available on the console? Also, what kind of fonts do people generally have installed? Also, am I and idiot for messing with the console in 2013?

[Skyrunner]

So still no way to have easy, pretty 3D terrain and water? Dx

[MagmaMcFry]

So still no way to have easy, pretty 3D terrain and water? Dx

Well, there are easy ways, and there are pretty ways. I wrote a Java/LWJGL application framework that lets me easily render some OpenGL stuff in a 3D environment with a movable camera, and in the process of my newest project I'm currently writing the same thing for C++/SDL, so I can give you the code when I'm finished, along with some quick usage examples of OpenGL. Interested?

[GalenEvil]

@Soadreqm: If you can I'd look for a font loading system, or build one, and then just distribute the font inside of the built distributable package. You may need to get permissions though, going by this line "However if you plan to ship this font with a commercial product, please check with Bitstream Inc, or otherwise do it on your own responsibility." from the linky you posted.

@Skyrunner: Maybe not super easy*. I'll see if I can find an GPGPL or other public domain library/source in C++ you can use to get this working

Edit:
* Deferring to MagmaMcFry since he's already working on something and he'll be infinitely more knowledgeable about 3D with C++ than I (>O.o)>---*