bieh.net

I came across a site today talking about a GPU-friendly terrain rendering algorithm for large datasets. The method described in the paper looked pretty simple, so I hacked together a quick implementation.

That turned out to work pretty nice, so I dusted off some old procedural planet texture generation stuff I worked on a while back and started to combine the two. While I didn’t get to the point of doing textures, I did manage to map the LOD system to a sphere. It works pretty nicely - moving in close ramps up the detail, zooming out degrades the mesh to almost nothing.

Here’s another shot not in wireframe mode. As you can see, I am yet to implement the crack-filling system that fixes the seams between parts of the mesh

The textures I generated in the old system didn’t look too bad, if a little cartoony. With any luck it won’t take much to port it over to this new renderer - here are some old images, just for kicks.

This post is basically just an excuse to post some images of BSOD2, my current project. It’s the replacement for the old BSOD system that was developed by WAND many years ago, and is starting to show its age.

In short, it’s a network visualization tool - each of those particles represents a network packet, and the particle streams represents connections. This lets people assess the current state of their network at a glance.