P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 153: Planet-sized Terrain: Part 32

The current goal is to find an efficient way to switch between the different distances that I am dealing with.

I have made some progress in transitioning between high-detail rendering and low-detail rendering. I have achieved this by first assuming a “max view distance”, beyond which the planet is not rendered. This view distance is 100 million Kilometers, or, 100,000,000,000 meters.

I have tried various techniques to subdivide the terrain within this distance, but the difficulty is that at these extreme ranges it is not really possibly to subdivide individual nodes, I would have to subdivide the entire planet, and this causes performance problems leading to infinite loops in some cases.

I have also changed a lot of the variables in the spherical terrain distance code to “long long ints”, or, as Torque called them, “U64” for Unsigned int, 64 bit. This will give me plenty of precision.

The solution I am working on now it to use a small number (no more than 3-4) of low resolution LOD’s for very long distances. This should not be noticeable, since the terrain will appear mostly as just a dot at these distances. I will then subdivide at closer distances using the current system.

Once I have this solution working, I will need to fix the texture painter, and correctly scale the planet with respect to distance. I will also need to come up with some way to test the various distances in code by simulating the players movement.

P152_DEBUG
10/08/2016 , 05:02:04 AM
Torque 3D MIT – P152

P152_DEBUG
11/08/2016 , 01:54:51 AM
Torque 3D MIT – P152