An essential aid to anyone who needs to build an outdoor landscape environment for their games. Geoscape3D combines the power of generating a virtual landscape in real-time, with smoothly blended textures to bring your scene to life.

Geoscape3D removes the complexity from producing beautiful landscapes. With a complete set of tools to raise and lower terrain, it becomes as simple as using a conventional paint package to produce valleys, rivers, mountain ranges and other geographic features.

Once the terrain is completed, Geoscape3D can quickly produce a realistic texture accurately mapped on the terrain. This texture can be updated as the terrain is modified.

Tasks that could take many hours can now be quickly completed in minutes.

Within Geoscape3D, the terrain is modified by a set of simple editing tools:

The user selects the area of effect and the strength of the effect and then uses the mouse to literally "paint" the terrain on to the heightmap. The changes instantly take effect in the virtual view. Make a mistake and you may use the undo feature to quickly remove an unwanted alteration. If you can use a paint package, you can model a landscape! But there are built-in functions to generate terrain for you as well.

Geoscape3D works with the principle of a heightmap, a picture where the colour of the pixels specify the height of the terrain at that point.

This is interpreted within Geoscape3D with the use of OpenGL as a three dimensional terrain providing the user with visual feedback instantly. The user may move and fly around this virtual environment to more accurately visualise the modifications they are making to the heightmap. Preset camera angles allow quick views from any point and you can even configure your own. You can view the landscape in Textured Mode (with configurable filter), Shaded, Wireframe and Point mode.

It's all very well being able to create good looking landscapes if you can't then use them in your own games. Geoscape3D includes a powerful Export routine that allows you to save the data in a format suitable for you. You can export your terrains as DarkBASIC Matrix Data Files.

Geoscape3D also allows the import of RAW data files and Bitmap files that are generated by many software packages. This enables an existing heightmap to be manipulated by Geoscape3D. Alternatively, custom import plugins can be written using the free plugin SDK to allow users to load terrains from whatever format they may be in.

A brand new version of Geoscape3D has been released (Feb. 2004) which features many new enhancements. The trial version for download on this site includes the new 1.1 features and existing owners can upgrade for free.

	The Key Features of Geoscape3D
	Download the Trial Version
	Download the Plugin SDK
	View the System Requirements