P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 135: Planet-sized Terrain: Part 14

I have made significant progress recently with regards to rendering realistic terrain. I have implemented the changes that I wrote about in my previous post, and this seems to be working. Essentially, I am taking the local space coordinates of the terrain (between -1 and +1) and scaling them to the true world-space coordinates of the planet (using 64-bit numbers). I am then performing the LOD subdivision on these 64-bit numbers, gradually iterating through the levels, and each time, I am discarding nodes that are outside a given range of the player.
The images below show this process at work:

P152_DEBUG
15/07/2016 , 06:13:05 PM
Torque 3D MIT – P152

Finally, I end up with exactly what I want, which is a small number of nodes that are less than 10,000 units from the player. This has worked very well. I still need to change the “scale” parameter in the editor to the true scale (a 64-bit number) but this doesn’t seem to cause any issues. When I scale up in the editor, the rendered nodes seem to be exactly right:

I haven’t verified the distance exactly, but they look to be approximately correct.

I still have a lot of work to do with verifying and improving this code, but I think I definitely have proof of concept.