Levels changed at fixed distances - 512 m, 1 km, 2 km and on - whatever the window, the
field of view or the zoom. Now a level is used out to the distance where one of its sample
spacings covers terraindetail pixels on screen, 3 by default, which follows from the
viewport height and the vertical field of view with the zoom applied; each level doubles
the spacing, so each doubles the distance. Zooming in or a taller window pushes detail
further, a coarser setting pulls it in. The finest range never drops below four tile
sides, which the morphing needs to close the seams.
Levels and morphing both follow the finest range the last scan used, so they always agree,
and a change of more than a percent - a zoom, a resize - triggers a rescan.
tools/terraincook/seamcheck.py now also tries finest ranges of 5.7 and 11.3 tiles, and
finds no gap in any of them.
terraindetail is in the ini and on a slider in the debug panel; the panel's level table
and the residency line in the log show the resulting ranges. On baltyk the current window
works out to 484 m, so the 512 m minimum applies and nothing changes by default; a
scenery setting terraindetail 1 got 1349 m, and the samples on the gpu went from 3 MB to
10 MB with it.
Tiles drawn at the same level met exactly, but a finer tile beside a coarser one has
samples on their shared edge that the coarser one skips, and the ground between them
could open up. This closes the gap the standard way (CDLOD): each vertex slides towards
the next coarser level as its distance nears the end of its level's range, so that by the
end of the band a tile is, vertex for vertex, the coarser tile beyond it. Levels also stop
popping when they change.
The mip chain is point sampled, so the next level's grid is this level's even samples. An
odd vertex slides onto its even neighbour and takes its height, and the grid, whose
diagonals all run the same way at every level, collapses exactly into the coarser
triangulation. No second texture and no neighbour information is needed; the morph is
computed per vertex from its distance to the camera, the same distance the level is
chosen by.
Two things the geometry demands, both settled by tools/terraincook/seamcheck.py, which
walks random camera positions over 128 m, 256 m and 12.8 km tiles and counts every edge
vertex where the finer side has not finished morphing or the coarser side has started:
- the band ends a rescan's worth of travel (a quarter tile) short of the level's range.
Levels are chosen where the camera stood at the last rescan, the morph follows it every
frame, and a band ending at the range itself left gaps at every level boundary;
- the band is a fifth of the range wide, and level ranges are counted in tiles (four for
the finest level) rather than fixed metres, which keeps the coarser tile's band clear of
any edge a finer tile reaches, whatever the tile size.
The script finds no gap with these values. In the game on baltyk, a low view differs from
the unmorphed shader only in a strip of distant ground at the horizon, and nearer than
the first band the picture is identical.
The cooker's comment claimed tile seams were identical at every level; that held only
for neighbours at the same level, and now says so.
