AC2 was RE: [MUD-Dev] Total Annilation of Downtime

[Brian Hook]

On Behalf Of Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com
 
> Don't see why, as a heightmap is a mesh. Only problem is if you've
> done some weird heightmap optimisation that doesn't work well with
> your general occlusion stuff. Still, that just takes some
> forethought...

But that's rather the whole point of a heightmap.  A heightmap isn't
superior for authoring or anything like that, it's superior because
of its extremely fast arbitrary indexing and because it compresses
like mad.  It in general it is 6x smaller per vertex than an
arbitrary mesh.  And, of course, topological connectivity is
implicit instead of explicit, so index lists go away altogether.
Then add in procedural texture coordinate generation vs. manual, and
for a given chunk of terrain, a heightmap is MUCH more compact than
any general representation.

If you don't take advantage of these characteristics, using the
heightmap is rather pointless since you give up a ton of generality.
And if you do take advantage of these characteristics, you're back
to the mismatch (internally) between heightmaps and meshes.

-Hook


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