Infinite Terrain Test

The last few days, I've been busy modifying a lot of my base code to cater for chunks (Despite this having become the de facto term, I hate using it and will be thinking up a new one soon). You can now walk around to your hearts content and terrain will just pop up (shaded and all) around you. Deallocation of memory (both CPU and GPU) is handled and theoretically you should be able to carry on running forever.

As you can see from the screenshots and executables (link below), I ran into some trouble with shading. Because raytracing is done on surfaces and surfaces are shaded in chunks, shading will look off at the edges. To counter this, I've generated padding terrain data for chunks but modifying my nest of code to take that into account is not yet completely ready.

The actual terrain also looks off in some places (edges again) which is probably just some simple division error I made somewhere. I'll hopefully pick that up soon. Also, the camera can't rotate infinitely to the left and it can rotate/move into terrain, giving the impression that you're in a very dark place.

Lastly, if you rotate the camera while having fraps open, you should see the fps jumping around a lot. This is due to the terrain not being sorted exactly right (front to back). I've implemented sorting of chunks which helped even it out a bit but, inside chunks, it is still possible for the closest voxels to be drawn last.

Perlin Noise

Simplex Noise

Next, I'll probably need to sort out the ordering of voxels so I can implement water (rendering translucent faces requires faces to be rendered in the correct order).

I'm visiting family for the weekend, after which work should pick up quite a bit but you can still expect regular (albeit less spirited) updates.