[MUD-Dev] terrain rendering (was: Future of MMOGs)

[Bruce Mitchener]

Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:

> Deformable terrain is just a nightmare (assuming you want a nice
> LOD based, TnL card friendly system with fantastic draw distance).

Well, the most promising LOD implementation around seems to be
Ulrich Thatcher's ChunkLOD:

   http://www.tulrich.com/geekstuff/chunklod.html

But, in this post:

   http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=1929871

he says:

     "Triangle counts these days are high enough (or will be soon)
     that maybe just doing GeoMIPs with too many tris is the best
     policy.  No costly error propagation or meshing -- just throw
     uncompressed & procedurally enhanced regular heightfield tiles
     at the card.  Still use recursive decimation, but don't try to
     be smart or worry about max pixel error -- with one triangle
     for every couple pixels, it doesn't matter much.  There's a
     very fine line between clever and stupid."

Geomipmapping should also be easier for doing deformable terrain
(definitely easier than a pre-processed setup like ChunkLOD).

Willem de Boer's tutorial on geomipmapping can be seen at:

   http://www.flipcode.com/tutorials/tut_geomipmaps.shtml

For whatever it is worth, Ling Lo on this list has done an
implemetation of geomipmapping for the Nebula Device
(http://nebuladevice.sf.net/), an open source (TCL/MIT-like license)
rendering engine.  Someone's currently working on a port of the
ChunkLOD code to Nebula as well.

And, as always, the VTerrain Project has lots of information, but
not relevant to deformable terrain:

   http://www.vterrain.org/LOD/Implementations/

  - Bruce


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev