The Planet Port

I decided to move on to making some water for the island and decided to make a water sphere the size of a planet made entirely of water. I was going to start with the ROAM (Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes) planet example by Sean O' Neil that I found on Gamasutra.

I took out all the height map code because I wanted a flat sphere surface which I wanted to tesselate based on how close the camera was to the surface of the sphere. I would then make those vertices closest to the viewer rise and fall on some cos wave pattern or something to look like waves in the ocean.

Here's as far as I got:


Then I decided I should really try to make the land first (including all ground under the oceans) with the ROAM mesh and work on the water mesh after I got that part working.

That's when I re-read the gamasutra artical and realised I was using an older version of O'Neil's code and that he had switched to a quad tree for the LOD (level of detail). So now I'm trying to figure out how that works, and hopefully I can port that to Ogre3d and make some real progress soon.

Island Update

Some more progress on my island generator. I modified the shape of the island by thinking about how a slice of the island changes as it goes from mountain top to hills to dunes to beaches. So I divided up the island slice into those four sections and each has a slightly different curve to it. I used parts of a sine wave for the top and dunes and then the hills and beach are just a constant slope.


Shaded Island


Wireframe Island

I also noticed that when I ran the program in debug mode I got about 60 frames per second, however, in release mode that number increased to 300 frames per second. Strange no?

I suppose the next step will be to implement either a sky box and a sea plane, or some basic textures, or some kind of collision detection so I can walk around on the island.

For the collision detection I might try using the bullet physics sdk, but there's no telling how difficult it will be to use that with Ogre yet

Island Soup

I've been working on a project to get me familiar with Ogre3d, which is an open source free graphics engine that runs on all major platforms. Anyways, the project is an island generator that uses random noise, and some math to make random island shapes. Here's one

I googled for ideas and related tutorial/articles and came up with this one about perturbing existing 2d images, on a site created by the guy who wrote this useful forum post.

here's some other screen captures:

First Post

I got the first post!!