Saturday, February 7, 2015

New Renderer

After some time off, working on other things, I have once more returned to the Renderer for the maps.  I liked the old one.  It gave the impression of a map built with pieces rather than sculpted.  The down side of that, was the fact that it drew the sides no matter if they could be seen or not.  This was very performance heavy and limited each board's width and depth to  ~15x15 hexes.  Beyond that, I had to be very careful how far in either width or depth, or both, the map went or it would error out, I don't know why Graphics cards still have a uShort, a bit over 65k, Triangle limit, but it really shouldn't be that hard to expand...

Anyway, here are the screenshots of the new renderer:





And with The water Layer added:




I will be adding the Modifier layer soon, but I am thinking that it would be better to wait until the modifiers are complete.  Roads alone are a headache since they can go in multiple directions.  Trees, rocks, etc, I see no real issue with.

My next step is to work on the Smooth Version of the Renderer.  Basically, it will be the above, but the tops of the hexes will dip up to .5 hexheights to attempt to meet the hex next to it.  It will be annoying, to say the least, to do the water layer, since you will want to expand it into the low-laying part of the hex next to it.  I am not sure how I will do that, to be honest.

Also being messed with is a simple 2D version of the Renderer, since that is rather simple to do, it should only the tops with 3 layers above the map.

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