6 Commits

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
maj00r	9408216ae7	Give the terrain its own archive, its normals, and a level per tile ... 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.	2026-09-20 21:22:03 +02:00
maj00r	b877bc0772	Cook the ground into a quadtree of mesh tiles, and keep the mesh the scenery drew ... 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.	2026-09-20 08:04:46 +02:00
maj00r	d2a5f284e3	Draw terrain one call per level, from texture arrays, culled to the view ... Each resident tile had a height texture and a material texture of its own, uploaded with glTexImage2D, and was drawn once per material it held with every other material's fragments discarded, all of them whether in view or not. Thousands of draws a frame. Now the tiles of a level live in one pair of texture arrays (terrain_tile_pool), a layer per tile. A pool starts at sixteen layers and doubles when full, copying what it holds on the gpu, so a level takes only the memory its tiles need; uploads go through a pixel buffer orphaned for each tile. The ground textures of every material are gathered into one sRGB array with mipmaps (terrain_ground) - drawn into it layer by layer by a small shader once the engine has each texture ready, since the scenery's textures are compressed and cannot be blitted - with a table of placeholder colours and measured tiling beside it. Each frame the tiles in range are tested against the frustum by bounding sphere and gathered per level into a buffer texture of instance data, and each level is drawn in one instanced call. The fragment shader reads the four samples around it, drops the cell when any of them carries no ground - exactly the rule the bake already assumed - and blends the ground textures of their materials by distance, so material boundaries follow the samples smoothly instead of stepping along triangle edges. State the copy pass changes is captured and put back, and the texture unit cache is reset after raw binds, so the rest of the renderer finds things as it left them. On baltyk: all 30 materials land in the array, 663 of the 1120 tiles in range are drawn after culling, and a frame is at most six terrain draws. The residency line in the log now says how many tiles in range were drawn.	2026-09-17 16:28:43 +02:00
maj00r	be4d691ae2	Choose terrain levels from what the screen can resolve ... 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.	2026-09-17 16:11:41 +02:00
maj00r	37ab4a35b3	Morph terrain levels into each other so neighbours meet without cracks ... 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.	2026-09-17 15:58:05 +02:00
maj00r	2660d14565	Stream the scenery: a baked terrain heightfield, a logic container, and prefabs ... Today's work on the binary scene format plan (binary-scene-format-plan.md), from the first measurement to a terrain that bakes itself on first run and streams from a thread. The step-by-step history is kept on backup/scene-streaming-format-presquash-0916. Measuring first. -loadprofile times a scenery load by stage and by node kind and reports node counts and resident memory. On l204 terrain is 95% of the bytes and 99.8% of the nodes; on quarkmce2007 vehicles, not models, dominate what is left. The terrain turned out to be a heightfield in all but name, a ribbon covering 12% of its bounding box. The heightfield. scene/heightfieldformat.h is the .ehf layout: Morton-ordered tiles of 128 samples with one shared edge sample, a point-sampled mip chain, zstd per tile, a nodata sentinel, a material palette with a measured tiling per material, and a stamp of the rules that decided what counted as terrain. scene/heightfieldreader.h reads it for the tool, the renderer and the loader alike, and scene/terraincooker.h writes it, shared by the terraincook tool and the engine so a first-run bake is the file the tool would have made. The cooker rasterises every triangle where it is drawn (through scene::place_in_world, the placement the region applies too), keeps an upper surface laid within half a metre over another and the lower of two further apart, and then asks each triangle whether the heightfield shows it: laid, reaching a sample, keeping nearly all it claimed, and with the ground around it drawn at every level out to 2 km. Baking on first run. simulation/terrainbake bakes <scenario>.ehf the first time a scenery is opened, choosing the grid step from the first 200,000 vertices, and on later loads leaves out the triangles its node table says the heightfield shows. Everything else - trees, grass tufts, gantries, bridge decks - is drawn as written, so a bad bake can at worst draw something twice, and the heightfield sits 2 cm under the triangles so the original wins there. Nodes are keyed by file, line, include parameters and placement; an edited file changes its keys and those nodes are drawn again. A bake under older rules, or without its table, is thrown away and redone. A launcher copy named $scenario shares the scenario's files. -nobaketerrain shows the triangles as written. A scenery can still name hand-cooked fields, several at different steps. Drawing and streaming. rendering/terrainclipmap draws resident tiles at the mip level their distance earns, deriving the grid from gl_VertexID and texturing in world space with the scenery's own materials. rendering/terraintileloader reads and decodes tiles on a thread of its own; the renderer rescans what is in range only after moving a quarter of a tile, asks for what is missing nearest first, uploads at most 32 tiles a frame, drops arrivals the camera has moved past, and keeps drawing a tile at the level it has until the right one arrives. The terrain has its own range, terrainrange in the ini and a slider in the debug panel, 20 km by default and independent of basedrawrange; the far plane of an ordinary view is pushed out to it. The debug panel shows the range, tiles in view, on the gpu, wanted and queued, and how many sit at each level. Events. The event queue moved out of the events into a binary heap with a deterministic tie-break, and an event is handed its activator instead of storing it, so basic_event is a definition and nothing else. The logic container. scene/logicformat.h and scene/logiccontainer write a scenery's events, their targets and sibling chains as flat, deterministic arrays with a schema hash that refuses a mismatched build. simulation/logiccook cooks it from the loaded state whenever it is missing, stale or unreadable, reads it straight back to check it, and resolves each target to a position in the registry its event kind searches. -cooklogic forces a cook, -verifylogic only checks. Nothing reads it at load yet. Prefabs. scene/prefab describes a signal by the aspects it can show - lights, speeds, animation channels, a sound - instead of pasting an .inc per variant, and expands an instance to ordinary scenery text. Tried on a light signal and a shape signal. Screenshots without a person present: -shot x,y,z[,yaw[,pitch]], -shotsettle, -shotstay.	2026-09-16 23:18:09 +02:00