Progress update on infinite maps

I’ve got a decently fast simple level generator going that feeds an in memory level map with chunks as they get requested, and I’ve got the renderer mostly working for all this.

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There are a few issues:

* If you walk far away from the origin (100 kilometers or so), the ground stats jumping around randomly. This is because the precision on the floating point numbers in opengl isn’t exactly great, and it’s expected. I need to make coordinate system local within each chunk.

* There’s some z fighting for similar reasons

* Chunks in negative locations don’t get updated at all.

* I set the map height to 256 and the fog distance to 128. This means you usually won’t be able to see the clouds. Not good.

Other than those bugs (and a total lack of things like lighting and entity rendering), it works much better than I hoped it would this soon. Removing and placing blocks works just fine, and the physics work great even far away from the origin.

It’s obvious that a big challenge is going to be writing an interesting level generator. Dense forests, islands, large deserts, abandoned settlements (and inhabited ones later on). Just infinite terrain on its own is fairly boring.

posted 14 years ago