Things are becoming messy, to say the least. It looks nice and clean in the screenies, but i still have to face a high amount of bugs or problems. I've recently been working on matching the lighting with the sun direction as seen through the atmosphere (yeah, it was incorrect before!), but i think i still have a bug somewhere.. and it's not easy to fix, since the sun has to be transformed by the whole objects hierarchy, which means lots of object-to-world and world-to-object space matrices calculations.
Edges are still visible between adjcent terrain patches, sometimes it's very ugly, sometimes almost unnoticeable. In order to fix it, i'll have to replicate the normals on the bounaries between adjacent patches, but i've yet to write the code.
Another problem is with the heightfield. In the transition between my previous tech demo (which was a standard, flat terrain) to the current one (which is curved on the planet's surface), i feel the heightfield has lots some style. Hard to explain, but now, everything looks very repetitive and similar, at any place on the planet. It's probably just a matter of finding good parameters for the noise functions, but again another thing to fix.
I've switched the high frequencies noise generation to diamond-square - that is much, much faster than 3D Perlin noise, by an order of magnitude at least, and it's important when the camera is near the ground level, since if you're moving quickly, a lot of terrain patches have to be regenerated ( and at that altitude the noise is at high frequencies ). Unfortunately, the same scale is used everywhere on the planet, so it's impossible to mix flat areas noise (for valleys) and mountainous areas noise. Another point in my TODO list.
