I’m not quite ready to start talking about my current game project, but one thing I can say is that it requires the ability to generate names procedurally. Of the several methods I’ve researched, Markov Chains seem to be the most promising. Among other things they can be used to generate random music, text, and individual words. We’ll be concentrating on individual words. A Markov Chain describes a state machine that can transition to the next state based only on…
Procedural Planet video showing the space-to-surface transition, as well as the tank driving around a bit. I’m pretty happy with how it looks, but there are a lot of things that still need to be fixed.
I needed a bit of a diversion from the planet rendering itself, into something that would give some purpose behind it. Why is the planet there? Well, what better use is there for a planet than driving a tank on it?
We left off in part 1 talking about the initial failures with my GPU geometry map shader. I did fail to mention that there was a bright spot the first time I ran the new code – it was amazingly fast. So fast I was able to increase the noise octaves from the 5 that would run reasonably well on the CPU up to 30 and still run at well over 60fps. I have to admit that I spent some of that first 18 hour day just roaming around on a barren, reddish planet. That huge improvement in performance made the pain to come well worth it.
So, at the end of part 1 we set up the C# code for executing the geometry map shader. Now let’s take a look at the shader itself.
I spent the past week moving my procedural planet renderer’s
geometry map creation code from the CPU to the GPU. It didn’t go as smoothly as
I would have liked, but in a way that was a good thing since I gained a much
deeper understanding of some render pipeline things that I had been taking for
granted.
Going to write up something useful tomorrow, but for now here are a few screenshots…
Previously I mentioned I was going to do a mulligan on my procedural planet engine. The few hours I’ve worked on it so far have lead to a beautiful new architecture that’s doing most of the same things as before, as well as some major new things, using about 25% of the code.