P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 53: Chunked Levels of Detail Using Quad Trees Part 21

I have done a lot more research into the problem I was having with the terrain system, and I believe that my initial thoughts were more or less correct.

The graphic below shows the issue:

Currently, the closest node, the one on the bottom right, will be subdivided. The other three won’t. However, the players view distance extends into the other three nodes, which means that the player will see visible gaps, since those nodes will not be subdivided or rendered. I am somewhat confident that this is the cause of the issue.

To fix it, I need to subdivide all higher level nodes that are within range of the players view distance. However,  I need to make this work on a per tier basis. In the above example, I want to subdivide all four nodes (since the players view distance overlaps with some part of each one of them). However, in the next tier, only the bottom right node will have all of its children subdivided, the other nodes will have only some children subdivided.

In this way, as the parsing algorithm moves through the tiers, it will behave in an efficient manner, only subdividing nodes when neccessary.

I am not sure how to solve this exactly, I will need to think on it some more. What complicates this issue is that I need to know if *any* part of the players view distance intersects with *any* part of the current node being parsed. I cannot use simple distance based checks. This is essentially a collision detection problem, I could learn a lot from current collision detection algorithms.