River geometry

Finally finished with the terrain/river/lake generation!

Yesterday’s problem was easier to address than I expected, everything worked perfectly quite soon… So, we had this yesterday:

And today we have this in the same place:

The screenshot doesn’t do it justice, but it’s much nicer and more “correct”.

So now I’ve started the generation of the “river mesh”, that will allow me to do animation of the water…

First try:

Yep, terrible, but it moves nicely!

Problem number one: I have a list of positions in a grid, so how do I convert that to a kind of “triangular strip”? Now as easy as it sounds! This was the first try, took me a while to actually get something rendering (a lot of silly mistakes), so I haven’t delved into what went wrong, but one thing that’s clear is that I need a way to make the “curves”… On the current algorithm, I only consider the current and the next position, but I think I have to consider one more to build the “turn”.

Problem number two: The texture… This one was the hyperspace texture, so nothing has been done to get it right, and I probably want to make some alpha out of it so that it adds some noise… The movement speed is also wrong, and I think the shader has to be modified so that it does a kind of fade of the movement on the edges of the polygons…

Problem number three: not visible above, but I think waterfalls will be a big problem as well, for the same reason that the curves are a problem here, but on a different plane…

Now listening to “The Enigma of Life” by Sirenia