Flying above forest

Managed to finish some other tasks before the shadows and detail ground textures.

First was placing objects on terrain, with persistence to cache. Later the local cache will be synced with a server, which will be also used to retrieve objects existing anywhere in the world, placed there by other users. We plan a multiplayer demo where users could build their own cities or settlements, and also visit other people scattered on Earth. Still a long way there, though.

Also modified tree rendering so that the boundaries between trees and more distant areas where trees are rendered as solid color are almost invisible. There is a better tree model used too. Now I should focus on the ground texture generation because its the ugliest part there.

Here is video with the new stuff:

Collisions - terrain vs. Jose

I am now reading the generated terrain tile data back from GPU and doing basic collision testing (ray vs. terrain). We test it with one model of man we call Jose Jalapeno, because of the lacking animation.



The yellow lines that are visible somewhere mark the boundaries of the tile where Jose currently resides - without this we cannot possibly find him in the world, ever.

We are currently working also on several other things too:

• Finally adding the shadows. We waited with these until quad-tree traversal would be right


• Detailed ground textures, selected by several parameters: climate, bedrock or soil type, terrain slope and curvature etc.


• Elevation datasets with better detail - 30m resolution for many mountain ranges, along with additional datasets for whole world with climate data. These will be used to select the ground material sets and to condition various other subsystems, like vegetation probabilities or modification of fractal algorithm parameters by bedrock type or other local terrain attributes.