Richard A. Hawley - Grome terrain modeling with Ogre3D, UDK, and Unity3D

Richard Hawley started programming in the early 1980s at the start of the home computer craze with the Sinclair ZX-81. Before leaving high school he had worked on three game projects for Assassin Software and later worked on conversions of classic strategy board games for 8- to 16-bit machines. He went on to develop end-user tools for popular flight simulations including Empire Interactives Enemy Engaged helicopter series and the highly successful Origin Janes Longbow series (MissioneerPlus).

Hes the director of Tricubic Studios, a small UK company dedicated to creating simulation and training environments using off-the-shelf 3D engines including Unity and Leadwerks. Together with technical artist David Hopkinson (Total War: English Civil War conversion) and physics guru Fred Naar (creator of Helicopter Total Realism for Microsoft Flight Simulator X) they are collectively known for their work on helicopter simulations.

I would like to thank my wife Dorothy for putting up with my long sabbaticals in front of the computer and my kids who have grown used to becoming experimental subjects on family board gaming nights.

People Ive had the privilege to work with; David Hopkinson for being a patient sounding board throughout our joint creative endeavors, his talent of being able to make silk purses out of sows ears is a testament to his ingenuity. Id also like to thank Fred Naar who not only created the most amazing and unique helicopter physics engine but who also is a really nice guy. Other thanks go to Rob Hardaway for years of designing impossible mission scenarios, but mostly for hanging around at flight simulation shows being mistaken for me (which Im more than happy about since hes six foot tall and fighter-pilot handsome).

Thanks to Adrian Licuriceanu at Quad Software for his technical support with Grome, and for playing the role of accuracy police for this book.

Finally, a big thank you to the simulation community, SimHQ, and various individuals that continue to be supportive in the face of my endless and annoying prevarication and distractions (of which this book is but one of them). Sorry!

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Adrian Licuriceanu started programming from an early age. Later, in both high school and college, he studied computer science and from the very beginning was fascinated with graphics programming. After graduating from college, in 2000, when a funding opportunity arrived, he founded Quad Software with the aim of creating technology for Massively Multiplayer Games. During the 5 years that he was the lead programmer he developed two engines used for MMO games. Later, he built on the previous experience to create Grome, a game-level editor currently employed by many professional studios. After two years of internal development, together with a small team of programmers, they managed to bring Grome to commercial quality and successfully launched the product in 2007. Currently, Grome is at its third version and it is used by many top professional game studios, simulation industry corporations, and universities. After another two years from the initial Grome launch, Adrian and his team made public the Graphite engine, the rendering middleware companion to Grome, an engine that can be used to render the complex scenes Grome can produce.

Stefano Provenzano is an Italian senior consultant and software engineer, who has worked on several projects in different fields of computer science including 3D real-time engines for PC and Playstation videogames, visual simulation and virtual prototyping, web application, and system integration.

In 2006, Stefano started his own software development and consulting company, Shin Software. Currently, Stefano is working on RIA and hi-quality mobile/web 3D real-time applications using Unity3D.

To my wife Irene and our children Davide and Pietro, your love gives me the strength to work and study hard.