P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 152: Planet-sized Terrain: Part 31

I ran into an issue with the first person optimisations. What I was doing was checking if the center of a node was within the players Field of View, or within a minimum distance of the player, and if it was, subdivide it using the LOD system, otherwise, render it at low detail. This worked very well, but, with the changes that I have implemented to the orientation of the player, the existing field of view calculation does not work. I believe it has to do with the fact that the player is now rotation on all axes, instead of all rotation being on the Z axis.

I tried a few different FOV calculations, all shared the same problem, and I don’t have a lot of time to spend on this right now, so I need to postpone it for a week or two at least. This is not a vital part of MS2, since the system works fine without it, this is simply a performance optimisation.

I also began work on one of only two major objectives left in MS2. That is the scaling of the planet from surface to space, ie, from a high detail terrain that the player can walk on, to a tiny dot that is barely visible. This will be a challenge.

The idea is that I will switch from the current high-detail node translation and rendering setup to a lower detail system at some distance, and then simply scale the terrain to give the appearance of the correct distance. So, the terrain will never be further than 10,000 units from the origin, or have a radius greater than 10,000 units, but I can scale the planet down to simulate larger distances. IE, a planet with a scale of 5,000 and a distance of 10,000 will look the same as a planet with a scale of 10,000 and a distance of 20,000.

I have made some preliminary progress in this area.

P152_DEBUG
10/08/2016 , 11:56:04 PM
Torque 3D MIT – P152