Terrain Rendering is an important part of any real time strategy game. It represents not only a visible representation of the world, but also the interactive elements needed by the player to advance forward in the game. In 3 space, this representation has the ultimate goal to become as lifelike as possible, so as to enhance the player's game play experience.

This in development engine takes this ultimate goal in consideration, while it doesn't intend to clone reality and materialize the lifelike world as we see it today, its goal of high detail and recognizable real world elements still holds true.

Real time strategy has very particular demands on rendering technology; A player typically wants camera angles from either a high viewpoint to be able to survey a particular area and the units strategical placement or, a relatively low angle showing details of a battle at the tactical level. To add to this the viewpoint can change location fairly quickly, as the player moves focus from one area of the world to the other to achieve maximum control of all his troops -- usually on demand by clicking on the mini-map.

We can see all this imposes a dramatic performance bar on the rendering engine.

If we want interactive frame rates, then we need to balance the way the renderer uses all the rastering primitives to maximize the 3d hardware usage.

The solution : Continuous Level of Detail Progressive Mesh. Known as CLOD for short.

Engine

Level Of Detail

Full Unique Texturing

Prototypes

Screenshots

Main