Re: [Algorithms] Terrain performance comparrisons

[De B. <be...@ii...>]

Basicly I want to do real-time visualization of detailed landscapes from
human height off ground like a fps. I decided heightmaps due to their
simplicity, and am implementing a few terrain algorithms to compare their
speed/quality in my situation. The terrain implementations are from Trent
Polaks book atm. Plants are very important and I have had much success with
them as billboards and alpha blend to high LOD up close. I have also had
success with multitexture splatting. I may be calling the terrain segment a
node and joining multiple of these together and hopefully obtain a very
large scale terrain where each node can be designed in independence. I got
this idea originally from dungeon siege
(http://www.dungeonsiege.com/su_216.shtml) and am looking forward to getting
games gems2 for that article Tom mentioned. The only paper I could find on
this was http://www.merl.com/papers/TR95-16a/ "Locales and Beacons:
Efficient and Precise Support For Large Multi-User Virtual Environments"
very good read, and many papers cite it. Anyhow now you know where my
research is. I am suspecting ROAM2 will give the best speed/quality since I
don't see any pops in Trents implementation however I will try to take
objective measurements. I know this is highly specific to my framework but
hopefully afterwards I can be more sure of which terrain algorithms perform
better, and it might help me get a job.

OK I may as well show you a picture, I know this shows more plants then
terrain but it will give you an idea of what I have achieved:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~bertdb/ryan/trees/mygrass.jpg

(Using Toms ideas I can make the plants look even better but more passes, I
probably will include that in my LOD system later)

-Ryan De Boer