quote:Original post by invective Its possible to make it completely seamless, but it takes some effort as you have to design your tiles to interlock with lower detail level tiles. There is an article on this in one the of the game programming gem books (you might want to go to the bookstore and take a look at it).
But that doesn''t take care of the pop-ups, you can clearly see the terrain changing detail levels.
I do own the Game Programming Gems book, but I havent had much of a change to read it yet. Crawl: your web page does not work. In fact, geocities reports your account is non existent.
Original post by invective Its possible to make it completely seamless, but it takes some effort as you have to design your tiles to interlock with lower detail level tiles. There is an article on this in one the of the game programming gem books (you might want to go to the bookstore and take a look at it).
But that doesn''t take care of the pop-ups, you can clearly see the terrain changing detail levels.
Phew ... what a week! I just finished my implementation of the Röttger Clod algorithm (quadtree based). During the whole runtime it just consumes one byte per height value. I guess Roam needs much more, because of all the pointers to the childs and neighbours.
The algorithm is distance and surface roughness based. The mesh state and precalculated roughness values are saved in the byte field. It uses a kind of roughness propagation between adjacent blocks to achieve a continous triangulation. So there are no forced splits.. And there is no vertex poping, the height valus get blended between two levels of detail.
If anyone is still reading this thread, perhaps I could ask if anyone has the XTerrain application data / & source? If anyone could, please send them to me at tryforfulluse@msn.com or contact me (again if possible) on how to get them. The programmer of the engine''s website is no longer up, on gamedev, if you didn''t know. Also, if anyone is interested I plan on writing a basic heightmap renderer, a texture generator, implementing fog / line of sight, and hopefully some way learn how to create some form of an LOD system or a way of dividing the terrain into continuous sections. Again, thank you for the replies.
Maybe it is not what you requested for, but check these pages: http://wwwvis.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/~roettger/ There is also a small reference implementation.
