Selective Mosaic Rendering

[cliff]

Something that could be kind of a neat feature would be the ability to constrain which mosaic tiles are going to be rendered, so you could have a very large, complex DM but only render the additional maps that you need at the time... then come back later and fill in other gaps as you go.

Would be really great for previewing really large maps without rendering the entire map.

[Aaron]

Hi Cliff,

Parts of this request are already on the to-do list, and this is in fact closely related to the recent request by Calsa for network rendering support insofar as both requests require the calculations to be tileable. I have completed this process for the terrain normals, light mapping (but not shadows), and texture generation calculations (per-pixel algorithm only), and I plan to have this going for the shadow-mapping, attributes map generation, alpha maps generation and 'regular' texture generation fairly soon. Extending this to the heightfield generation and water-mapping algorithms will be tricky, however, because these calculations are not 'well contained' (i.e. they spill-over into neighbouring tiles without warning).

In any case, for the calculations that are tileable, I probably won't include the option to run only specific tiles as an 'official' feature because it could be oh-so-confusing, but I probably will provide it as a plugin (with source) for those daring souls willing to try it.

Thanks again for the request.

Cheers,
Aaron.