Bitter Sweet Success

Having quickly modified Decade, to store saved/generated terrains using floating point values rather than unsigned chars, I am happy and disappointed with the result.


As you can see above the smoother gradient makes the terrain looks allot more natural. It has been commented that the staired terrain looks cool, like contour farming, and perhaps it does in unique circumstances but it will not work for the terrain in general. Despite this success the loading/saving time and file size has been affected even more than predicted. Huge Height Map files and long loading times are not acceptable.

Some more research needs to be done for terrain storing and loading. Different possibilities which instantly come to mind which may or may not work are

• Split the terrain over many files and load the segments coming into view on another thread
• Store the terrain in the original .raw file and use some logic to smooth the vertices's