I have been thinking quite a lot recently about some of the upcoming aspects of Britonia, and some of the decisions I made at the beginning of the project.  For a long time I’ve wanted to create a game with a sense of depth and emersion, somewhere you could go and play open-endedly, without a [...]

As with all games, Z-buffering plays an important part when rendering the pixels to the screen. During the development of Britonia I have often run into a problems related to the Z-Buffer, so I thought it would be nice to share what I have learned about them and how to avoid these issues.

This small tutorial is really just an extension of the first article I wrote on 3d improved noise on the CPU. More specifically we’ll be getting it to work on the GPU this time.

In this tutorial I’ll be covering how you can use perlin noise and various fractal functions for generating textures either at compile time or run time. The full source code is provided at the end of the article, but I have tried to write it as such that you can follow through each step and steadily build up your own XNA 3.1 app.

Well it’s taken a lot longer than I originally planned, but here is the third part in the Noise series. In the last two noise articles, I explained how I was using perlin noise to produce heightmap textures, as well as the code used to implement Ken Perlin’s improved noise function. So far this has all been on the CPU. In this article, I will explain how I ported this onto the GPU to produce heightmaps and diffusemaps for all the terrain patches.

In the past weeks, I have approached the issue of generating procedural roads at runtime based on different maps generated by the Engine. The road generation is based on self-sensitive L-Systems.  This article will outline what L-Systems are and how I have started to use them to procedurally generate road networks.
This can be a pretty [...]

I have been working on many things in the last 6 weeks, so I think it is time for another progress update.  In this update I will outline which components I have started and the progress, including LTrees, GPU map generation and the GUI.
It hasn’t all been quiet on the site though, as it did [...]

Over the last few months, I have made quite a few posts and answered a few questions about the issue of imprecision, and more importantly how I overcame it. So I have decided to write an article, so I can always link back to it.

Again its been a while since the last update, and again, not due to any inactivity, but rather I’ve simply had too much to do. In this article, I’ll just go over what I’ve implemented and what I’m still struggling with in the last 3-4 weeks.

This is another article which I plan on writing in a few parts. I have added a pretty simple cloud layerr to Britonia using a distored fBm fractal and improved noise basis function. This is used in a shader to generate a per pixel cloud map, which is then just sampled over a spherical ‘terrain’ which a height of zero.