Infinite Procedural Terrain Engine

AnimateDream · December 11, 2010, 5:21am

Craig:

Thanks for mentioning my setup. Just to clarify, my terrain system includes 2 renderers for the same underlying tile based system. The geoclipmap based one is very unfinished, and the geomip one is just trivial and poor use of Panda’s existing terrain stuff as tiles.

The system has 2 parts, the renderer, and the tile source/bakery. The intention it to be able to use any renderer with any tile source. Currently there is only one tile source, and it is a very confusing, complicated and experimental one. As I’m a coder not an artist, I made the a tile source that procedurally generates terrain. As an experiment, I tried doing this fully on the GPU with a series of shaders (called maps) defined in a custom file format. It does work, but it has some huge performance issues (unnecessary copying of all intermediate steps to ram I believe). Regardless, its pretty quick, but horribly confusing and not very useful in practice.

With actual artist produced maps (or a decent map generator) and artist produced textures (ok, mine are from an artist, but they are for the wrong zoom level and taken from another project), and a decent renderer, it could be nice. Its missing a major feature: the ability to place meshes on the terrain, but its in the design, just not done.

Craig! Pleasure to see you’ve noticed my little tinker toy. It would be totally remiss of me not to mention any similar projects. Especially when my terrain engine is very immature. I just started the thread to provide some insight into how one might use panda3d’s technology to start creating their own terrain system, and when I inevitably did I just decided to dump it here too.

Your post actually clarified a lot of things for me. I’ll have to look over your code again with that in mind.

Ahhh. The whole project is pretty brilliant. I’m looking at your comment now and trying to digest it. This project is my first foray into shader languages, I wasn’t anticipating this kind of resistance. I expected it to be no more finicky than C. If I understand you correctly shader output and input parameters can get mismatched unless you use a semantic? I need to figure out how to use semantics on the arbitrary float values I’m passing between them then.

I’ve been putting off picking a license, but I want a generally unrestrictive one. BSD sounds good. The textures I used are not mine and there are a couple unused shaders written by others I used for reference. I obviously have to exclude those from the license.

Feel free to cannabalize any and all parts of this project. I’m a fan of collaboration. I really just want a terrain implementation in panda that can provide infinite procedural terrain. I’d rather teach my engine how to make good maps than have to make them all by hand.

My project is pretty straightforward to understand I hope, but in its current state its so slow its almost broken. It almost requires you rebuild panda3d with true threads instead of simple threads to avoid serious stalls while its building or updating terrain. I know what to do to fix the performance, I’m just too busy being baffled by simple shaders refusing to work for me.