P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 112: Optimisations and Debugging

I have recently exposed all of the main control variables in the terrain to script. This allows me to easily change the terrain at run time. This is also an important step towards making the terrain instance-based (currently, only one terrain object can be created).

The main problems now are the seaming issue, the terrain shader, and the view distance and quality settings.

Based on some experimenting I did, it seems that these issues should be solvable by simple configuration changes, with the exception of the terrain shader.

I should end up with a quite a good looking and high performance terrain at the end of this, which is exactly what I was aiming for.

Additionally, it seems that the terrain is, as I thought, independent of scale, due to the fact that the terrain is produced procedurally. I have tested the terrain at resolutions up to 4096, (which means a resolution of 4096 for each face of the terrain, so the entire terrain would be 4096*6, or 24,576) and there was no change in the performance.

Once I hit the 10K limit of course, I will have the usual issues with floating point precision, but these will need to be solved anyway.