More T2D Terrain Stuff

I haven't been able to spend as much time with my random map generation stuff as I would like, but the progress I have made is fairly visible, so I figured I'd post some screenshots. Everyone likes screenshots.

In my last plan I showed the quick proof-of-concept that I threw together to test out my idea. In the first iteration, the terrain textures were blended together in software to make a single texture for the map, which was then slapped onto a quad and rendered. Obviously, this approach would use a lot of texture memory if I wanted to make a very large map that had a lot of detail.

In the latest version, the textures are blended in hardware according to an alpha map. The alpha map is still occupies some texture memory, but much less due to the fact that it's only an 8 bits per pixel image. The dimensions of the alpha map are also much smaller than the map itself, due to the fact that it only contains blending information so it doesn't suffer in quality as much when it's enlarged.

You'll also notice that the terrain textures are now tiled, and have smooth transitions between them.



I'm going to expose some of the generation parameters to script tonight, and do some cleanup of the C++. After that I'm going to put it aside for a while and start working on actual gameplay. If there's one thing I've learned from all of my past projects, it's not to get caught up in one detail too long. An unpolished game is more entertaining than a polished 2d map renderer.

Edit: Closer picture to show detail