Super Blog

This is slightly off topic, but the company I'm working for (The Supergroup)has created a blog that you should check out when you're looking for something new and interesting:
The Super Blog

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