A walk in the woods

Entry posted by Rastar · January 22, 2014

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After cluttering the regular Leadwerks forums with irregular posts and screenshots about terrains, tessellation and the like, I thought it might be better to collect those in a blog where I can happily mumble to myself without distracting anyone...

So what's this about? Well, from day one of my (not so long ago) foray into game development I have been interested in creating large outdoor scenes. Now, most game engines don't support the required features for that out of the box, and I guess for good reason: Rendering large outdoor areas is difficult and resource-consuming, while playing in them tends to be a bit - boring. But I still find this to be a fascinating subject, and I also have a game in mind that requires large terrains (and hopefully won't be that boring...). And Leadwerks with its open low-level APIs makes it possible to implement some of the needed features myself.

And why the blog's title "Tessellate This!"? Well, the new 3.1 version of Leadwerks does not only come with a new renderer, it also provides complete access to the additional shader stages of OpenGL 4, namely the tessellation control and evaluation shaders. That is something you won't find in many other engines, and it enables the implementation of some interesting algorithms for rendering large terrains etc.

On my laundry list of things that I'd like to do (and mumble about) are

simple shader programming for dummies (like myself)
algorithms for large terrains (not virtual globes, but scenes of about 100x100km)
rendering forests
atmospheres, clouds
roads
water, especially oceans.

As I said, I'm still pretty new to game dev, so don't expect any expert advice. But if you like you might follow me stumbling around, making some mistakes so you don't have to, and maybe producing the odd nice screenshot.

So, here I go - mumblemumble...