Well, the shader is fine. The meshes I was using had no TBN data so the normals were not getting translated into model space correctly. I don't know why I didn't recognize the default data in the tangent, normal, binormal input registers in PIX. Let this be a hard lesson learned, always check the validity of your starting data when things ...

I just found my old Baldur's Gate saved games a played a little. I'd forgotten how amusing Minsc was! "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... watch it! I'm huge!""Go for the eyes Boo, go for the eyes!" (to his pet hamster)"Butt kicking for goodness!""Evil 'round every corner, careful not to ...

Maybe someone here can help me with this, it's driving me nuts. I've been working on a fairly simple HLSL shader and everything is working pretty well except for one problem, I've spent hours tinkering with the code and stepping through disassembly in PIX with no luck. The normal map looks fine from the 'front' of the sample ...

[quote user="Stainless"]As stated in other threads, ;> , another way of doing it is to write a shader that takes a world coordinate as an input and generates a height value from it. I use simplex noise. Then you can generate height maps on the fly for any size you want. [/quote] I'm not sure what moving the heightmap ...

Actually I did find a bug in my scaling code that was causing some staggering, so... yeah. I still don't like the overhead of creating a 1024x1024 map to scale it down 75%, but it's workable. Thanks.

[quote user="jwatte"]You generate the terrain as a height map. A heightmap is a texture. If you have a texture size 1024x1024, and you want it to be size 800x600, what do you do? (Hint: texture filtering is cheap if you use render targets) [/quote] Yes but scaling artifacts can be rather noticible in a heightmap, and these maps wrap so ...

[quote user="Nick Gravelyn"][quote user="Zazu Yen"]Anything that calls 'new' is creating future garbage,[/quote]That's not true. Calling 'new' on a struct still allocates on the stack and is not handle by the garbage collector.[/quote] Ah I didn't know that, I'm still pretty new to C#. Thanks for ...

Anything that calls 'new' is creating future garbage, you should always avoid it inside tight loops or in methods that are called many times in a single frame. (But be very careful of using cached instances of things like Lists by just clearing them if you're in a multi-threaded environment.) You should also try to be aware of utility ...

[quote user="Craig Martin"]It's my understanding midpoint displacement depends on power of 2 sized maps and there's not a lot you can do about it. After playing with various heightmap generation algorithms I got fed up with the inflexibilities and restrictions so I threw it away in favour of programs like L3DT which do a better ...

[quote user="Big Daddio"] Oh man I was all about the RPG's, just it seems they were more on my mac or PC than on a console. And lets not forget great stuff Railroad Tycoon, Sim City, Civilization, Warcraft, Diablo. If you look in that vein I think you'd have a great XBLCG. [/quote] All of those game types require tracking a ...