A 128km x 128km terrain is easily rendered on low end hardware, and the level of detail can be tweaked to reduce triangle count, or increase detail depending on hardware. This gives me a terrain that can render all the way to the horizon with no real size limits and nice LODs that fade gently with distance. Having the vertex data available on the CPU is required anyway for collision detection. And at the moment I still wanted to support hardware that doesn't support vertex texture fetch (or does but it's slow), so I cache chunks of the terrain on the CPU instead of reading the height data with the GPU. My implementation started out true to the paper, but now I use a slightly different tessellation of the terrain with alternating diagonals, rather than all diagonals in the same direction. I started with a paper called CDLOD (Continuous Distance-Dependant Level of Detail Rendering) for height maps. So I went ahead and coded a new terrain system. Terrain RenderingĪ lot of the new games I have in mind require a larger terrain than is in Banished, and unlike Banished, they would require a free camera that can look up to the horizon.

But I've been itching to work on new games, so I've been working on new things more than working on Mac and Linux versions of Banished. And while the game runs on those platforms, there are still a bunch of details to implement for a final product, plus testing. Way back in June, I was working on getting the game code running on Mac and Linux.

Banished the game disc