Terrain

[Anecoz]

• Textures per tile (part of TileInfo)
• Instanced base mesh of some fix resolution per paged tile?
• Different types of textures for displacement, materials and so on

[Anecoz]

After the overall move to a more component based design this is the current rough idea:

• Add a terrain component, which specifies a heightmap texture and a tile index.
• A terrain system of some sort goes through (updated/patched) terrain components. If the node that the component is attached to lacks a Renderable component, the system generates a mesh from a common grid model + the supplied heightmap.
• When the generation is finished (essentially a procedural model generation), a normal Renderable component with this new model is added to the node. It will also force set the transform and so on.
• The renderer will have a special "isTerrain" flag on the internal representation of the Renderable.
• The isTerrain flag is used in the cull shader to generate terrain-marked draw calls, similar to the grass currently.
• The terrain-marked draw call buffer is used in a TerrainRenderPass, so that we can sample per-tile textures of displacement, materials etc. It outputs like everything else to the gbuffer.

Treating terrain essentially as a Renderable, the renderer is (almost) agnostic to the fact that it is a terrain, except for the special flag. This results in things like acceleration structures being created automatically and just general conformity to the way the renderer works.

The drawback is that we cannot instance the terrain draw calls, but it should not really be much of an issue.

[Anecoz]

Closing now as a solid foundation for terrain is in place. Will create more issues when the need arises.