Terrain implementation for games is a subject with a lot of depth. At the surface, it's very easy to get rudimentary terrain working via a noise function and fixed triangle grid. As you add more features, though, the complexity builds quickly. Overhangs, caves Multiple materials Destructive terrain Collision detection Persistence Dynamic loading Regions, biomes Very large scale Smooth features Sharp features Dynamic level of detail Extremely long view distances In isolation, each of these features can make terrain difficult to implement. Taken together, it takes a lot of care and attention to make it all work. Minecraft is probably the canonical example for terrain generation in the last generation of games. In fact, I'd say Minecraft's terrain is the killer feature that makes the game so great. Minecraft does an excellent job at 1-8, but for a recent planetary renderer project I was working on, I really wanted 9-12 too. In a series of articles, I'm planning to break do...
I've been writing a new game recently -- and this time, I decided to use an entity/component system . Boy, does that approach make things easier! In other games I've written, I've struggled to fit new gameplay features into the existing code base. With a entity-component based systems, it's easy to add new features: Need a way to track targetable objects in your game? Add a Targetable component that advertises the unit's position, name for display in the HUD, etc. Need to add some new AI behavior to a unit? Add a component! Update all the AI components once per frame and you're on your way. Does your game need networking? What should you do...? Add a component containing all the info for network serialization! Need to control a unit from user input? Add a joystick component that updates the unit's position component in response to user input. Basically, any new feature can be folded into a component. The best thing about components is that they are dy...