Infinite Procedural Terrain Engine

darthrigg · December 8, 2010, 10:41pm

AnimateDream:

So I’ve evolved my brief demo into an infinite procedural terrain engine here:
https://github.com/AnimateDream/Panda-3d-Procedural-Terrain-Engine
I’m very happy with the terrain quality, but the performance is a bit slow. It runs ok now with heavy use of threading, but panda3d only uses simple threads unless you rebuild the core to use true threads.

There’s a more sophisticated terrain engine made by Craig here. Actually its two terrain engines. A geomipmap engine and a geoclipmap engine. The former utilizes the cpu more and the later calculates geometry right on the gpu. The geoclipmap wouldn’t run on my radeon hd 3870, and I found the geomipmap terrain rather ugly personally, though its probably mostly related to the textures used. Also I found it rather difficult to understand, but that may just be me. My engine is still simpler, and hopefully sufficiently commented. Anyways if you need a terrain engine I really recommend looking both over.

The .7z post/link works. But when I cloned via git… I get errors for missing files:

:grutil(error): No valid heightfield image has been set!
:grutil(error): Failed to load heightfield image heightmaps/ID123X0.0Y128.0.png!
:grutil(error): No valid heightfield image has been set!
tile generated at 0.0 128.0
:grutil(error): Failed to load heightfield image heightmaps/ID123X128.0Y0.0.png!

Cheers,
Gary