Just a little eye candy today.

I’ve adjusted the terrain rendering such that most of the terrain information is now carried in textures, instead of in vertex data. This means that when I draw low-resolution terrain meshes (which have fewer vertices covering a larger area), those low-resolution meshes can still be use high-detail ground textures and normals, which means that there’s now virtually no visual ‘pop’ when the terrain switches between lod levels.

In particular, note how the road now remains smooth in the ‘After’ image, where it became pixelated and disjointed before. Similarly, the mountains now retain their rounded appearance even in low lods, where they used to become diamond-shaped and blocky. Also note that the ground undulation is not still crisp and highly visible, where it previously used to become “muddy”, as large parts of the mesh data was being thrown away at lower lod levels.

I’m somewhat aggressively scheduled to hit the Milestone 7 build at the end of this week. Only two major tasks left to do, and I think I roughly know how to do them. So, I’m getting close!