Skycastle Game Platform / News: Recent posts

I had problems in optimizing the previous terrain renderer, so I started writing a new one, using test driven design from the beginning to try to ensure clear and working code.

This is taking longer than anticipated (I guess it shouldn't be a surprise), so there is no new release this week.

The new terrain engine will allow better visibility culling, and calculating of only the new parts of the landscape that become visible at a given step, instead of recalculating the whole landscape. This should speed up the terrain rendering considerably. In addition, it has short down-turned edges along seams in the landscape, eliminating the problems with single pixels along the landscape block boundaries where the background color shows through.

Skycastle version 0.0.2 has been released.

The second release of the Skycastle game platform adds static objects to the terrain.

The object distribution is calculated by a density function. The objects are updated as the camera moves, to always show the objects around the camera.
The models of the objects are shared to avoid creating execssive amounts of similar models.

The camera movement speed was also increased, and the resolution mode selection dialog is presented at each run.... read more

This first release demonstrates the terrain rendering engine of Skycastle.

It uses varying level of detail, with more detailed terrain closer to the viewer, and a procedurally generated terrain (using Perlin noise). Thanks to this, it is able to support very distant views (the current settings are set to 32 km).

There are still areas that can be improved, such as reducing terrain 'popping' by using geomorphing, and increasing the terrain resolution at medium distances.... read more