PageableTerrainFormat
Pageable Terrain Format supports a large number of desirable features for a terrain/level geometry runtime format for virtual worlds:
- Whole Earth capable
- Allows geospecific terrain
- Accelerates collision queries
- Looks good ("game good")
- Incremental download
- Underground/overhang/indoors
- Pageable/chunked file access
- Open (not tied to a vendor)
- 64-bit clean
- Extensible
- Robust
Other desirable feature:
Other desirable feature: embedded pathing information (independently of any algorithm that may be used to generate them). Deformable should be quite good too (but difficult in practice).
-- Emmanuel Deloget, News Team Lead @ gamedev.net
Good thoughts! The nice
Good thoughts! The nice thing about the format is that you can add arbitrary additional format, with a type, that can get paged with the rest of the data. Thus you can start out adding your own kind of pathing data, and if it's useful, open up the specification for the world.
We've already worked on "deformable" as well, although we had to cut that from 1.0 for time reasons. The idea is that you can store an iterative deformation chunk for the base terrain, and apply that to the base chunk when you read it in. As long as you mostly remove data, or modify existing data, that will be fairly efficient. If you want to add a lot of new data, though, you'd be better off to re-edit the existing file.
Btw: editing the file at runtime is possible, as the file format is specified to allow transactional edit commits. However, version tracking in that kind of system becomes a nightmare.