Overview:
Terrain is just a project where I'm messing around with XNA to see what I can do. The basis of the project was Reimer's advanced terrain tutorial. Since completing the tutorial, I've been adding my own changes to see what kind of things I can do with it. This project is the basis for a final year masters degree project on terrain LOD algorithms. It will involve assessing the performance and quality of three different algorithms in various scenarios and then attempting to improve on the performance by developing my own algorithm or tweaks to current ones.
So far I've experimented with:
- Random heightmap generation algorithms.
- Inputting heightmaps from file.
- Algorithms for swarming creatures (e.g. shoals of fish).
- Playing with water effects.
- Direct graphical manipulation of heightmap data.
- Interpolation of zero heightmap points with their neighbours to smooth edges and allow procedurally generated sub-zero sea floors.
- Retrieving and inputting heightmaps from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data.
- Generating a "slopemap" with which to determine texture application.
- Determining snowcap areas.
- Determining if an area is flat enough for tree placement.
- Generating textures with mipmaps.
