Terrain Tuesday #7

Optimizations abound! OpenGL provides the ability to create vertex buffer objects. I’ve talked about VBOs before, but in case you forgot, they basically allow you to keep all manner of vertex data on the graphics card, rather than sending it from computer memory all the time, which gives you an even better speed boost over vertex arrays. Bottom line, if the graphics card supports it (which most do) Canyon Terrain Editor can render over six times as many vertices, and still get better total FPS than with the old system, which was even an improvement on immediate rendering. If you notice that that wasn’t the literal bottom line, well, it’s because there’s more. For a while now, the editor has supported “brushes” that add even more detail when you edit the terrain. I’ve now enabled that behavior for texturing as well – seemed logical.

I still have some fun plans for this, so stay tuned.