I suppose I should post some screenshots to show what I've been working on.


Caption: This is my "debug mode" view of the game world. You're looking at a second camera, its view frustum, up direction, some hilly terrain, and a white cylinder which currently represents the players "mage" object. The camera can be moved like a first person camera, or it can be switched to another camera in the scene.


Caption: This is a wireframe view of the same screenshot. It doesn't really show much more, other than the fact that the world is composed of triangles.


Caption: Although its not a recent accomplishment, I've been able to create chunked geo mip mapped terrain. The wireframe demonstrates a few different terrain blocks at various levels of detail and how they "close the gaps" by skirting with any higher resolution neighbors. Each block consists of 16x16 tiles at the highest resolution, and the number of blocks is dependent on the external heightmap image file.

Caption: This is just a gameplay view of the terrain, showing changes in elevation and texture. Right now, the only "fun" thing to do is fly the camera around the terrain, pretending to be a fighter pilot on a harrowing mission who happens to do a lot of barrel rolls.

In the future, I plan to use a procedural generation technique for creating larger terrain blocks off of a seed value (perlin noise maybe?). Currently, the terrain supports deformation (which is useful for terrain manipulation spells), but if I procedurally generate my terrain off of a seed value, it would mean that after the terrain has been generated, I can't guarantee that the terrain would be unchanged after gameplay, so I'd have to store vertex information... which could take a lot of disk space and time to save & load. My current thought is to store the seed value, generate the terrain based on the seed, and also store the vertex information for the blocks which have changed from their original seed values. That would save on the file size and loading times a bit, but at this point in the game dev process, it's irrelevant because it's not essential to prototyping the game.

The latest update allows the player to draw a selection box in 2D screen space. It's barely not even worth mentioning since it's such a small and trivial update, but will probably be quite important due to its use by players. I think it's going to be the first part of my graphical user interface, so I'm trying to be careful with how I architect it.