This week has been spent making my first steps on the engine. I’ve started by getting a good working environment in place, with useful debugging and development features at the core. This should speed up development of the engine later on.
So far I have the engine capable of generating and rendering smooth terrain from a grid of ‘volume’. To begin with, it’s using a heightmap to create the terrain. The system works in such a way that I can have smooth hills, jagged rocks, cliffs and caves, all powered by the same terrain engine.
The game engine runs very well so far. I’m testing it with a terrain of 640 by 640 meters and runs at a decent framerate (50-80 fps) on a laptop which I’m using to develop the engine. You can dynamically modify the terrain in real-time (digging or building), with very little framerate drop.
I’ll post some videos showing some specific features soon.
- Luke