Hi, am not a professional from any computer science related field, actually come from the geosciences. Retired on an Atlantic island. Tought myself the basics of C and C++ starting some 5 years ago, on and off. Had to halt everything last year when a volcano erupted a few hundred m up from my place. Being reduced (like still several hundred others) to a trolley and an overpriced rented room feels a bit like leaving home for studying back in the day, only this time with a credit card and an insurance payment.
Found a place to build a new house, construction is underway.
Understanding that when doing games/simulations you either do an engine or a game (that's meant mutually exclusive) I looked at what I deemed the best(tm) about 2 years ago, the Unreal engine, but never got it to run reasonably on Debian GNU/Linux. A good month ago I downloaded Unity, that worked flawlessly (apart from MS Visual Studio for coding and C# as the scripting language, which leaves me depending on MS for licenzing of any software), but the progress when working through the learning paths was too sluggish. I am not a fan of video learning either, not much information density in it :-)
What I want to accomplish first is trying to integrate a terrain lod renderer I made. It is based on CDLOD by F. Strugar of which I made an OpenGL copycat. Basically it would allow planet size rendering of heightmaps with real data, not just good old but repetetive noise functions. Old guys need their hobbies :-)
Am currently porting the thingy to Vulkan, hoping to integrate it into the Godot Engine through its (reportedly) easy mechanisms to attach C++ modules or GDNative programs.
There are several difficulties to overcome which I yet have to research. First, it needs shading down the pipeline. Second, single fp precision is not enough, have to see what to do there. Thirdly, it would need streaming of data, which is probably the least of the problems and fourth a data structure up to the task, for which I have a solution in mind.
This may still all be just a brainfart, but I want to see how it turns out. First: tame Vulkan.
