Terrain - Multi-texturing

Alright, what we have now is directional light lit terrain with sharp textures and no distortion. Although green is my favorite color it is obvious that real terrain is not consistent regarding its surface, its texture. We can enhance the visual appearance of our terrain by using multiple textures.

We will cover different parts of our terrain with different textures and we will have intermediate parts where two textures should blend to each other, that is more than one texture will be applied to the same fragment which is called multi-texturing.

Terrain - Triplanar UV mapping

The visual appearance of our terrain got better with anisotropic filtering but there is still one major visual artifact that bothers me: texture distortion on steep slopes.

To fix it we should use a more advanced texture mapping technique. Let's try triplanar mapping.

Terrain - Anisotropy

First thing I noticed regarding the visual appearance of my terrain is that parts of it are to blurry. And this makes my terrain look less realistic.

To solve it let's use anisotropic texture filtering.

Terrain - Getting started

It's time to start some real work now. :)

This time a big part of my game design gets revealed because as the title indicated the game will be played outdoors and I'll need a terrain for that.

Fps - but not first person shooter

Alright, I have a camera and I can observe things in the world but an another thing would be useful as well: to see what kind of impact a new feature or modification has on performance.

What I need is the frame per seconds (fps) to be displayed.

"Flying spectator" camera

Here we are, let's get started!

My first though was that whatever I want to start with and get displayed on my screen as first I definitely want to examine it properly.

To make it happen I want to create a camera that can fly around in world space.

Kick-Off

Hello Everyone,

my name is Safi and decided to create a game on my own and blog the development process.

I have an almost complete ("wished to have") game design in my head but I rather choose not to tell it. :) I'd like to reveal it step-by-step in form of different features and small milestones encapsulated in separate posts.

It's worth to note that I didn't meant this blog as a tech. tutorial or similar rather I will concentrate more on concepts, decisions and on presenting screenshots and video sneak peeks where possible.

Therefore while discussing features or anything game-related I will expect that the reader is already:

• familiar with XNA and has written at
  least some basic 3D applications with it
• familiar with HLSL, knows what vertex and pixel shaders are for and has written at least some basic shaders e.g. basic per vertex/pixel lighting
• familiar with linear algebra, e.g. knows what a vector or matrix is and what their different operations correspond in 3D space
• in possession of rudimentary rendering knowledge and has at least a hint about things like:
• draw primitive
• vertex
• normal vector
• texture co-ordinate
• light source
• main transformation matrices (world, view, projection)
• spaces (e.g. world, view, object, tangent, screen)
• z-buffer
• alpha blending

I'm already excited about the journey we are about to have and hope it won't take much to have my first post. :)

See U there!