=?UTF-8?Q?J=c3=b6rg_=22Yadgar=22_Bleimann?= <yaz### [at] gmxde> wrote:

> What do you mean with "custom file format"? Anything binary rather than
> text?

No - I think what you need to do is what every computer graphics and movie set
designer does to get things like this to work - cheat like Hell.

You don't need 40 billion triangles where a few thousand, or a cleverly textured
primitive with normals will suffice.  I completely understand your goal - but at
the present, you will let the idea of the perfect sacrifice the reality of the
good.

If you have a very large tile - but there isn't much of note on it, then why
model every grain of sand?  Select the parts that NEED detail, and designate
those as meshes or some other detailed form.
What can you adequately get away with using heightfields, and planes and bezier
patches?

With bicubic patches - for the cost of only 16 control points you can get
2^u_steps x 2^v_steps triangles....

Fewer data points, less storage, less reading from disk - more interpolation and
procedural generation.

I'm not sure how all of the tiles are arranged on the globe - but I would start
with the framework, and decide how best to tile the surface.  Then when
rendering, the scene file only renders what is in view, and close enough to need
actual modeling.   Something like a view from space wouldn't need 8000 tiles -
you could do it like a soccer ball with 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons - or just
UV-map a sphere {}.  As you move in closer, the camera-globe distance determines
the model type and level of detail (LOD).


Then you can easily have 8000 tiles worth of renderable placeholders with
location markers, text for what you'd like to see there, comments in the code,
etc.  Missing tiles get a checkerboard or something to visually show that it's
missing.

I'd also institute a file naming system for easy version control, so that you
don't have to manually edit the parent pov file or parent inc file when changes
are made, but it's easy to see which one is newest.   "Tile 8000_2020_04_13.inc"
or something like that, and then you can include Tile 8000_*.inc" without
issues.

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