AndreasR wrote:One important thing to figure out is how to update the terrain map as the game goes on. […] What do you think?
I haven't tried yet, but I think incremental updates can be done. The only non-local (thus harder to update) parameter is the map height, which is currently computed using a really inefficient recursive function. Maybe it can be made faster by using a loop instead, but incremental updates will be faster. We'll need to measure, but I'd prefer not to cheat.
I'm more afraid of scalability with big maps (think Europe); I think we'll need to break them down into chunks of a few thousand tiles.
AndreasR wrote:
What kind of tablet do you have? It works on my Android mobile phone.
It's an Intel Atom Z3560-based Android system with 2GB RAM and a PowerVR Rogue G6430 GPU. I'll investigate the problem further.
vasc wrote:IIRC the map generator on the server uses a heightmap as a baseline to generate the map. If you could use those values to compute terrain height values, instead of deriving them from the simplified terrain, perhaps it would look smoother?
There are several map generators, all of them working differently. And user-made scenarii/maps don't have height information. Actually the map can be made much smoother just by tweaking a few numbers; high mountains is a desired effect.
Louis