I am making a bit of forward progress, I got hung up for a while on deciding the layout for my tiles in the monolithic vertex buffer. The original idea was to keep the vertex buffer as a grid of the entire map, and the use indices to group them into tiles. However this meant that drawing each tile required a large span of the vertex buffer to be processed uselessly each time it was renderd. So instead i structure each tile as it's own rectangular grid linearly in the vertex buffer, this allows me to render a tile by simply specifying a vertex buffer offset. Since splatting it going to require me to render tiles in multiple passes I feel it is important to reduce needless vertex processing.



Flat map, dirt and grass texture


Height map, snow texture

I took a smarter approach to height this time around, I created a HeightMap class, which can load an 8 bit raw image file (like the kind that terragen exports and that photoshop can read) this file format is very very simple, AND with photoshop has good tool support so I chose to use it as our heightmap source.

this class loads and manages the heightmap, and provides a 'sample' method, which allows you sample part of the heightmap via u,v coords (0 to 1) and returns a 0 to 1 value.

I am going to offer this class as freeware to any who would like to use it; it will require a bit of modification to fit your needs but it should be minimal.

HeightMap.h


HeightMap.cpp



Now that I have a well-developed tiled terrain the next step is to add splatting, which I will document when I have it working.

Enjoy =)