P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 158: Planet-sized Terrain: Part 37

I am making strong progress with the distance scaling/LOD system for the spherical terrain, but it has been slow progress.

The restructured scaling and LOD system seems to be working out ok, it is now almost complete. Tier 1 is completely working again, although this is the easiest tier, since the view distance is the longest.

I have solved some issues with the performance of the system (the culling was not being done in some cases) and I also had some issues with texturing and a lot of issues with the general tier-subdivision.

There are still some problems with Z-fighting in the system, as can be seen from the below images, and there are also problems with Tier 2 that do not seem to have been fully solved with the switch to the new system, but I feel I am relatively close to a solution. The issue is, as I mentioned previously, dealing with a situation where the user is too far away to simply cull anything outside 10k, but too close to render the planet as a scaled-down sphere.

The general approach that I am using is to render the planet as a scaled sphere until it reaches a point where it cannot be scaled up anymore without causing rendering or precision issues. That is tier 1. Then I switch to tier 2, which will subdivide all nodes within view of the player, (based on their current distance from the planet’s surface) and cull the rest. The hope is that this view distance will be within the limits for 32-bit precision. If not, I may have a problem. Once the user gets to within 10k of the surface, I switch to Tier 3, which is a very highly detailed level with an extra subdivision step and a collision mesh.