Hello all
Im beginner in 3d gaming , i have basic question not Language specific.
Say i have ground model for example terrain i modeled what is the common way to load the terrain and use it again Or load another terrain when
the main model for example AirCraft im controlling in the game approaching its end , and i want the player to see the terrain continue like in never ending world .
The basic answer is... well, you make sure to load it in time before it has to be shown.
Rather useless answer, but without further specification its hard to answer better.
If you want to repeat the same, then you can draw the same model twice without having to reload anything.
Though, in practice, this gets a lot more complicated.
When dealing with huge meshes like landscapes, you also need to make sure to handle "level of detail" (LOD), to make sure to not draw billions of barely visible micro triangles wich kill your performance.
Making sure to load in and out parts of the landscape as needed usually ties into the LOD algorithm.
Its far from a "basic" problem... But you could start with researching what LOD is and why it is needed.
Edit:
The most basic algorithm to check if something is close enough it has to be loaded and/or drawn is simply checking the distance.
Another nice structure to speed this up is Quad trees.
Not sure if you are asking how you can make your landscape models seamless so that they can be used for an infinite terrain or if you want to know how you can create terrain that always changes as the aircraft moves.
Never-Ending world sounds like a procedural content generation question (you can feed that to Google to figure out if that is what you want) while loading sounds like a "how to stream existing terrain" question. If you want to write a map editor rather than leaving the terrain generation to the program, you migh still be able to use some of the algorithms and data structures in procedural content generation articles / tutorials (this is the kind of article you would find: http://www.gameprogrammer.com/fractal.html).
For example there are perlin noise algorithms that make sure the pattern wraps around to make the tiles seamless.
If you want to know how to create seamless terrain using a specific tool, you might want to ask how to do that in the artist section or on a community that specializes on that tool.
If you want to know how to load and display seamless terrain, I guess Olof Hedman's reply is covers most of the general aspects/considerations and you need to provide more specific questions if you are stuck.
Hello and thanks for your answers ,
well im looking at the simplest solution that is , i will model the terrains but i don't want to load them all into the engine
so logically i want to be able to show them only when my Aircraft near them and they will "unload" when the Aircraft get away from them
and all this to be seamlessly .
LOD algorithm can be something i will lock at .
but again im looking to implement it in the most simplest way there is
like : Temple Run game ,
