Now with Internet!!! (sorta)

Okay, I am now back after a 2.5week stint without the internet. I managed to do a little work on the Terrain Generator but not much at all, and none that warrants a picture being put up. I have instead spent the majority of my time away from the internet working on another project which I hope will get me a paying gig!

My current project is mostly something to show the prospective employer in lieu of having a workable portfolio up and viewable. The task was/is to produce a usable map of a Universe made up of Sectors and connections between the two. This Universe is to be scalable between 1,000 sectors and 50,000 sectors.

I have been able to get the scaling up to approximately 40,000 visible sectors, but at that point it requires nearly the full 4GB of RAM that I am allowing allocated to the program. The program is capable of generating far greater than 50,000 sectors, and so the bottleneck is in processing into renderable surfaces.

Here are some pictures of pieces of progress:

(fig1. 1,000 sectors with approximately 1700 connections between them)

In Figure 1, the red colored nodes are Sectors with centers at the shown location. Instead of using Sphere meshes, which has about 560 vertices, I am using a much smaller Isosphere mesh which has 101 vertices. The use of Isosphere meshes instead of normal Sphere meshes is a new development and should allow the display of a full 50,000 sectors without reaching the memory limit. The Sectors in the above picture are randomly placed. In the release version the sectors are placed using a Simplex Noise function and will lead to a slight clumping of Sectors which will lead to the illusion of an actual Universe model.

(fig2. Composite Image of several Screenshots)

 

In Figure 2,  parts of the composite image are labeled in red. A and B are the same image. A has all points shown as wireframe meshes, and B has the same points shown as textured and colored meshes. The pictures marked (1) in red are the wireframe and colored versions of one Bubble Group. The wireframe version is easier to distinguish the highlighted Sectors that make up the Bubble Group. The pictures marked (2) in red are effectively the same as pictures (1) but the Bubble Group selected is in another portion of the universe. The final picture, in the upper right corner of the image, is of the rendered scene composed of a portion of the Sectors in the Universe.

These two pictures are the majority of the actual showable work that I have gotten done in these last two weeks. A longer more comprehensive discussion of what makes up the images above, and new ones that I will be making in the next few days, will come next time.

Hope you enjoyed the read as much as I enjoyed writing this one!