The tiles moved out of the scenery's pak into an archive of their own: a
sorted index of fixed-size entries found by where a tile sits in the
quadtree rather than by a name, each entry compressed on its own so a
tile can be read without touching the rest. A name apiece would have been
seventy megabytes of index to read before the first tile could be drawn.
An entry carries what its tile's ground asks for - how far it departs
from the finest mesh, and how long its triangles are - because which
level to draw has to be settled for tiles that are not on the card yet,
and the index is the only thing about them that is read up front. Until
now the figure came from the tile's level, which is the worst tile in it,
so one steep corner spoke for every tile that shared its level.
The mesh carries a normal per vertex, octahedron-encoded into two bytes,
in place of the face normal the fragment stage worked out from how the
view position changed across a triangle. A face normal makes the ground
read as facets, and a coarser level's facets face differently from the
ones they stand for, so the light over a hillside changed as the level
did. A geometry stage hands the fragment stage the three materials of the
triangle it is in and the barycentric weights, so ground changes over a
triangle rather than along its edge; 3.3 has no gl_BaryCoordEXT.
And the level a tile is drawn at now counts the camera's height. The
distance was measured on the ground plane alone, which puts the tile
underfoot nought metres away from a camera a kilometre above it - and
nought metres asks for the finest level there is, so a view from the air
wanted the whole ground at full detail, more tiles than the buffers hold,
and what would not fit came out as holes.
Archives written under the old rules are refused at the door and baked
again.
The ground in a scenery is already an irregular mesh, so the cook keeps it: it cuts the
triangles along the tile grid, welds what coincides, and builds each coarser level by
collapsing edges. Nothing is resampled, nothing is interpolated, and a hole the scenery left
stays a hole. What was here before threw the triangles away, kept their vertices and built a
fresh Delaunay triangulation over them, which filled every hole, merged the two heights of
every retaining wall into one, and - because it never erased the super-triangle - emitted
indices three too large together with triangles reaching out to the artificial corners.
Tiles form a quadtree, as Cesium Quantized Mesh intends. A distant tile is a large one, so the
horizon costs tens of tiles rather than the thousands a fixed grid needed, and the level to
draw follows from the tile's own geometric error against what the screen can resolve - which is
what the format carries that field for. Every vertex on a tile's border survives into all of
its coarser levels, and so does every edge between two of them, so two neighbours drawn at
different levels share their border exactly: there is nothing to stitch and nothing to morph.
The file layout is the format's, with two deliberate departures, both written down in
quantizedmeshformat.h: the geodetic header fields carry scenery metres, there being no
geographic reference to convert from, and the material a vertex belongs to rides in an
extension of ours. Texture coordinates are not stored at all - ground tiles in world space, so
the coordinate follows from the position and from how many metres one repeat of the material
covers, measured off the scenery once and kept in the terrain's table.
Tiles live in one archive beside the scenery, an entry each, compressed on its own. Baltyk
cooks to 546 kB against 2.2 MB of heightfields, quark to 361 kB against 9.6 MB, tomaszewo to
375 kB against 9.9 MB.
Drawing is one call a frame: every resident tile lives in the same vertex and index buffer,
with its vertices measured from the middle of the terrain so that the whole map fits in floats,
and a frame is one glMultiDrawElementsBaseVertex over the tiles the walk chose and the frustum
kept. On baltyk that settles at 291 tiles resident, 16 MB of mesh, 85 tiles and 6k triangles
drawn.
What counts as ground is what the scenery says, not what its triangles look like. A node under
origin, rotate or scale is an object standing on the ground; a material with an alpha channel is
a tree, a bush, a fence or a catenary mast. Everything else is laid whichever way it faces, so
the side of an embankment or a cutting goes in with the rest instead of leaving a hole along
every bank. Whatever is left out is recorded per node, and the scenery goes on drawing it.
A cook is a cache: it is used again only when the archive, the note of which nodes went into it
and the manifest of what the scenery was made from all agree. A manifest listing a file the
scenery names but does not have used to fail that test for ever, since an absent file never
matches - quark has such an include, and nothing beside it could ever be reused.
tools/terraincook cooks the same way outside the engine, and meshtest beside it checks what the
cook promises: a tile reads back as written, neighbouring tiles agree on their border to the
millimetre, a hole is not filled in, a wall is laid exactly once, and a material's tiling comes
out of the source. seamcheck.py goes: it tested the morphing constants of a heightfield nothing
reads any more.
