Hi JohnJ,
Awesome work, as always. I think we're all still a little giddy after your foray into fast foliage rendering, but I'm glad to see you're keeping yourself busy with interesting new projects.
JohnJ wrote:Unfortunately L3DT doesn't adapt well to planetary terrain generation (due to seams at the corners of the "cube" layout, so I may have to make my own terrain generator if I can't work out the problems with L3DT
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Hmm...I've had a thinker about this in the past. I've pretty-much discounted the possibility of generating the whole terrain as a spherical mesh, since I'd basically have to start from scratch. My erosion and other mapping routines would not translate to non-Cartesian grids without, effectively, a total re-write. As much as I relish a challenge, this would have to be a
very long way down on the priority list (much other cool stuff planned for the next few releases.)
The other alternative was to generate the terrain as a regular heightmap, and then apply all the requisite distortions to stitch the map into the 6 or more heightmaps. Tillot and I made a sort of quick-n-nasty
spherical distortion plugin, but this only worked on the heightmap cube facets individually, and didn't attempt to merge the seams. However, I'm quite sure a better plugin could be written to do smooth spherical distortion with facet stitching, given an arbitrarily clever programmer with suitable motivation and time.
Of course, it then becomes an issue to generate attributes/land type maps for the distorted heightmaps, as L3DT's attributes map algorithms won't work on tilted terrain without modification. Without looking at the code in detail I can't say whether it could be suitably modified without a rewrite either.
Anyway, I'm very interested to see where you go with this. Please keep us posted.
Best regards,
Aaron.