hypermine
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Chunk LoD
As of #63, we're GPU bound on weak hardware. Using simplified geometry for distant chunks could help alleviate this. A very simple approach would be to run marching cubes on entire chunks, such that each chunk is a single cell, containing only a few triangles. Challenges include:
- Preventing geometric gaps between LoD levels
- Addressing the discontinuity between boxy and smooth terrain (if we retain boxy voxels)
- Texturing the topologically very distinct geometry (if we retain boxy voxels)
transvoxel presents an elegant solution for LoD boundary stitching with marching cubes.
This should not be addressed before #41, which will reduce the number of triangles rendered dramatically and shift the bottleneck.
@patowen's benchmarking currently indicates that the rendering time for voxels is utterly insignificant compared to CPU costs, so we should not invest in chunk LoD for the foreseeable future.