Alpha 10

For this update, I did two big things, I introduced two more materials to the terrain rendering process. This means that now the terrain can be any combination of 4 different materials. The process with which the game selects these materials has also been changed and is more robust. I have also added support for DXT5 files. DXT5 is a lossy compression algorithm (4:1 compression ratio) designed for use with Direct X. The reason I chose this is because when rendering the terrain which could full the entire screen takes a lot of texture look-ups to get the correct color data. I.e. for a 1680x1050 screen, this could be up to 8,820,000 texture look-ups in a single frame. This was a big hit to the frame rate. Most of the problem (caused by my GTS 250) was the texture fetch speed wasn't high enough to cope with the data being transmitted. To fix this a material that used less memory was needed, thus DXT5 because it supports RGBA color with its 4:1 compression ratio. This gave the required performance boost to ensure the game does not need to be ported to C++ any time soon.

The download like for the Alpha 10 is: here

Please feel free to try edit the world in any way you see fit. Instructions on this can be found in the extras folder.

Next stop, different types of terrain nodes (I.e. Smooth hills, mountain tops and cliff faces)