Actually my system is setup to use either of two LOD techniques. Currently it uses brute force, but it still updates because tiles are loaded with a maxed out tile size, but nearby tiles have their tilesize set smaller which forces them to update. Using threading this doesn’t really create noticeable lag on my computer.
The initial tile generation is still a killer though. Its set to use small tiles and a task will load them up in another thread one at a time, but it doesn’t build them fast enough to let the player move very quickly without exposing unfinished terrain. Also it creates horrible stalls when there are a lot of tiles to build. I’m not sure yet why the threading isn’t solving that.
Panda’s whole heightmap image thing isn’t too practical for procedural terrain, but even when I cache the images on the drive and reuse them in subsequent runs it doesn’t seem to yield much of a performance gain. I would be happy to hear if you found an alternative.
Well i tried making them to uniforms and making my own semantics for them in panda and that apparently resulted in my fshader getting 0’s on all the values. I suppose I’ll pack them into some unused register… it just goes against all of my programmer instincts.