Mayfly Studio

Yeah, I dunno, we’ll see where this goes.

What you’re seeing in this screenshot is kind of neat, a concept for fractal landscapes I’ve wanted to try out for, oh, years and years but never gotten around to. The overall layout of this environment is a grid of three by three hand-created points. Each point has an altitude but also has the amplitude and decay settings which are used to create fractals with different looks (amplitude governs how large the variation in height is at the top level of the fractal, decay governs how quickly it flattens out as we subdivide.) To generate each tile, we generate four landscapes, one with the settings for each point, and then interpolate across the tile between the four to produce the final output. This lets me have fractal landscapes with smoothly evolving parameters across space.

Besides this, I’ve also done some behind the scenes stuff: the most important was grabbing the shader code from my planets demo and polishing it up to make it an easy-to-use class in my engine. A lot of swearing and crying went into figuring out how to use vertex attribute arrays and I wouldn’t want that knowledge to be tucked away in the planet demo code. The image above doesn’t use shaders yet (it’s *gasp!* a fixed-function directional light!) but that’s on the menu for the next bit.