Heightmap Terrain flicker

[Dan]

do you have any plans for adding the bump mapping? that will double the number of texture slots you will need which makes a single pass blending a bit less attractive.

[Colin]

after some planning i have decided i will most likely add a render stage system, allowing for multiple effect files for each stage, so i can have texture/diffuse, bump, lighting per stage.

[Dan]

are you going to implement some sort of level of detail algorithm? I assume you do not use any yet, but when you increase the size of the landscape if you do not manage the number of vertices you use the performance will drop straight down to crawling. if you are planning to use some kind of LOD, it is, in my experience, much easier to start with that instead of lightning, texturing and blending implementation, because these stages depend a lot on how you implement your level of detail.

[Colin]

i will most likely just implement a quad based render queue

EDIT

maybe you can help me out with something?

i'm fairly new to HLSL and i've ran into a difficulty... rather than hardcoding my alphamap scaler value i want to automatically stretch the alphamap across the whole terrain automatically.... any ideas how i can accomplish this? I was thinking of 2 options....

1: divide 1 by vertices of the terrain, so 64 vertices terrain = 1 / 64.
2: add an internal semantic into my effect loader to grab the dimensions of the model.

what do you think?