The flight simulator terrain development has moved forward a bit again after some time focusing on other things. One constant question that I have not been able to fully put to rest is what part of the earth should the terrain cover? I am now leaning towards the Mediterranean area centered around Greece and Turkey, possibly also including most of Italy. The terrain is a nice mix of water and land with plenty of interesting islands and great mountain ranges.
One area of the terrain generation process where I have been looking for a solution for quite some time is how to add roads to the terrain. I think I have come up with a decent solution now and tests so far have been good. Now we can inject real life road data into the terrain generation process and this will add a lot to the visual realism. The process will still need improvements but it is a good start and I think it’s far better than no roads at all.
A flight simulator terrain covers a huge area and it presents some unique problems that you normally don’t run into in FPS games and many other game types. It’s mainly RPG’s and MMO’s with large worlds where you also have to deal with this problem, namely floating point precision. When you travel farther away from the center of the world the math that calculates where your character is, or in this case the aircraft, becomes less and less precise. This will then show itself as objects will start twitching and shake etc. Without going into any details at this time, the first step of a solution to deal with this has been implemented and more will follow later.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any new exciting screenshots to show this time but I’m sure we will in due time as we make more progress on this project.
