Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Screens of the day 03

Here are a few screenshots with the new random elevation generator at different zoom levels:


And here you can see the full map without a cross section at the current Z level:


Right now the only thing that is preventing me from making this an official feature (except a few minor tweaks) is the performance. The engine was not quite designed to handle such an absurd number of tiles and I am not sure if it is even possible to do. The interesting thing is that I am having better performance in software mode as the tile number increased when compared to hardware mode. I guess that I am approaching the magical limit where the overhead of communicating with the hardware outweigh its benefits, like I did with the 3D engine putting a huge number of meshes in the scene at once.

But no worries, I'll optimize it as much as humanly possible, and then I'll look into some tricks to only create the impression that everything is genuinely rendered. With tiles so small, some detail is not noticeable and I'll try to actually draw one large tile except for 4 small one when working with terrain.

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