Want More Math?

These last days I've been working on enabling gamepad support and fixing bugs. Nothing super exciting, but one of the bugs I fixed had me use some math to solve,  so I decided to share with you guys.

If you hate math, then the update may end here for you as the rest may be very boring, so see you in ten days :) If you wanna stick around a bit longer I'd be happy to walk you through the game's LOD tesselation equation:

You see, the main landscape terrain is very low poly, but the closer it gets to the camera the more its faces get sub-divided to make it high poly. However some computers can't handle high polygon tesselation while others can, so we need a  render quality settings in the game to dictate among other features, the tesselation level, I came up with 5 quality tiers for the game, thus 5 tesselation equations:

X axis represents the distance (in meters) from a point on the terrain to the camera.

Y axis represents how many polygons the tesselation generates for that face of the point the camera is looking at.

This means: the higher Y is, higher the quality of the terrain. 

The red curve is the highest quality tier of the game, then the orange, blue, green and finally purple, the lowest quality but fastest render.

Keep in mind that tesselation is capped at 1 meter for all points, meaning, if the terrain is closer than 1 meter, the tesselation amount does not change.

I came up with this formulas by pure empirical analysis, which is basically a fancy way of saying I punched several different approaches until I got the most out of it :D

Hopefully this update sparked your interest. Thank you for reading and see you in the next one :)

The game is 16.7% complete and 44.0% ready for alpha release.