P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 118: Final MS1 Bugs and Optimisations

I am very close to the end of Milestone 1 for this project, I should have it done in the next day or so, assuming there are no more major bugs found.

I should have really separated this milestone into several smaller ones, since it has taken so long to get this far.

I now feel that I have a working concept of a spherical terrain implementation, with collision and height-based texturing.

I have exposed all of the terrains control variables to script, allowing for rapid, real-time customisation of the terrain.

I have also send the minimum and maximum terrain height values from the Spherical Terrain code to the shader, which cause the terrain textures to update in real time as well. This has led to one bug which still needs to be fixed, as can be seen below. The terrain height values are relative to the world z-axis, not the terrain object itself, which results in the textures looking like this:

I am confident that this can be fixed easily.

There are also some fundamental bugs with the terrain generation, which I posted on previously (namely, the height scale and smoothness contrast). I will not be able to fix these for MS1, in fact I may wait until I have solved the 10K problem (and scaled the terrain up to a realistic size) before It tackle this, since the scale of the terrain may be affected by the raw size of the planet.

I am also having some issues updating the terrain’s heightfield, and saving the terrain’s values to a mission file. The heightfields is only generated once, and I believe that when the user changes the perlin noise settings in real time, the initial heightfield won’t change, only the subdivided values. I also get errors when I save the terrain in real time to the mission file and try to load it. Additionally, the terrain doesn’t auto-update when it is first created. I am still working on these bugs, but I don’t know if they will be done for MS1.

Other than that, I am basically done.