Terrain

[benwiley4000]

A bit late, but better late than never?

Closes #22. Closes #25. Closes #113.

We've now got rolling hills. The player and other objects get placed appropriately on the surface of the terrain, and the player follows the terrain as they move.

The terrain heightmap is generated via Perlin Noise, which I used a small library for.

Note that I renamed TreeC to TreeCluster and did a bit of refactoring (I made everything non-static static, since it's basically just a namespace, and moved most of the transformation logic into WorldTile, similarly to other objects). Some of this was necessary for terrain-wise placement but the rest was just to make the class easier to reason about while I was doing that.

A handful of remaining issues I want to solve before merging:

• [x] Collisions now aren't handled correctly because the player isn't level with the object at the time hitboxes are created. We can fix this by doing some kind of offset math when computing the y range for the hitbox.
• [x] If you check out and run the branch you'll see that movement is really choppy - At some locations the terrain will briefly change shape. The effect is even more dramatic and noticeable if you change the static constexpr int terrain_width in WorldTile.hpp from 20 to something much lower like 4 (lower poly terrain).
• [x] Because the terrain is somewhat steep, not all objects are placed ideally (we can see under many of them). A few things we can do to improve this:
  • [x] Place the object where its center intersects the terrain, not where its lower corner intersects.
  • [x] Perhaps dip certain objects down into the earth a bit more
  • [ ] For wide objects (i.e. rocks) we can rotate the object to match the tangent of the terrain. Not sure how simple this will be.
• [x] Collision knockback doesn't yet take terrain into account.
• [x] There's a whole lot of repeated code in the World.cpp player movement handling - maybe it could be reduced to one function.
• [x] I'll need to remove some std::couts.

[lucastle6969]

I saw your video on facebook . . looking good. I'm busy with another assignment until Monday . I'll take a look after that

[benwiley4000]

probably won't be done until at least then, anyway 😄

[benwiley4000]

Most of the important points are now dealt with but I still don't have collision knockback following the terrain. I might re-write how collision knockback works - I think Kai's solution was amazing as a last-minute push but it's a bit difficult to work with for what I'm doing now.

[benwiley4000]

Also note I updated the Text and Rock classes to center their vertices around the model origin (rather than pushed to one side of the x or z axis). This helps with a couple of things:

1. Rocks no longer hover above hillsides because of the anchor point being all the way at the end
2. Seed position notices can be centered above the actual position, and are unlikely to be clipped by an adjacent hillside.

[benwiley4000]

Ready for review

[benwiley4000]

Feel free to merge when ready

[benwiley4000]

Does it seem more painfully slow than before?

If not I might want to merge now and next work on performance improvements. I have some leads.

[benwiley4000]

Did you check out the changes I made to the Rock and Text for centering the vertices?

[benwiley4000]

@lucastle6969 do you want to try running this again? I haven't done much that I know of to fix runtime performance but the time it takes to generate new trees should be way way lower than before.

[benwiley4000]

I'm gonna do some more optimizations later when I have time

[benwiley4000]

Sorry this PR has become so huge. On the upside, I've merged in my work on water, and I also made some pretty dramatic performance improvements. There's still work that could be done but I think I've eliminated most of the CPU-side bottlenecks (besides the long tile loading times which I think can wait to be fixed with #70, although I did make tile loads faster).

@lucastle6969 could you check this out and try it on your machine? I'd like to know if it's still unplayable.

[benwiley4000]

yayyyyy!!!