Never going to finish this if I keep doing what I'm doing xD .
I decided that the best thing to do would be to change the way terrain works once again. In all previous iterations of the program I have used simple random numbers to place tiles in a grid of pre-determined size. The second python version that I never released (with water and good pathfinding etc) worked by filling the grid with water tiles and scattering some land randomly, then passing over the grid repeatedly growing the land with a random check to see if it grew on each pass.
The first 3D version filled a larger grid with land tiles, then randomly seeded a heightmap with maxima and minima to create hills and valleys. These valleys were changed to sand tiles and were effectively underwater.
However, I wanted to reduce the cost of rendering the map. The way to do this is to split it up into sections, and only bother with the stuff within a certain range of the camera. If I make it work in this manner, the reason behind not having very large maps is gone, and therefore the maps can be of potentially enormous size. However none of the approaches I had previously taken are particularly conducive to very large maps, since the entire map must be generated before it can be used (due to the random scattering of land or hills/valleys being totally random, and therefore a lot of processing needs to be done on what is created to give smooth and coherent terrain).
I am now in the process of writing a map generator that initially generates a large map, only parts of which will be rendered at any point in time, but which in the future will be able to generate more terrain on the fly. This has the potential for worlds of vast size.
Initially a grid of hexagons is created, and filled with a colour decided by a Perlin noise algorithm. This colour represents the type of the tile - land or water. This hexagonal grid is then 'rasterised' to get an even larger grid of square tiles (the actual terrain) with height based upon the distance of the tile from sea level, with random perturbation. These tiles are stored in groups of 16x16 tiles called regions. The rendering engine will test if the centre of a region is in the viewing distance, and if it is then that region will be rendered. The regions will store all things that are scattered across the world, such as trees etc. This will allow the render cost for each of these things to be reduced by only trying to render a fraction of the full amount.
All in all - better terrain and also better fps is being implemented
.
