So we reached the final part of our series of tutorials and as we exposed those algorithms to you, we need to remind you one thing : we barely scratched the surface of the terrain engine.

This is the final part of the Voxel terrain engine article. It follows the third part called Voxel terrain - Beautification features.

Conclusion and future work

Here's the final output of the program, so we started with a height map and a diffuse map that we cut into small pieces so that we could quickly cull the parts that are non visible. We use a fast occlusion detection that allows us to update a pixel only once and gives us a vertical antialiasing at the same time. The background is a simple procedural model of the sky and sun.

What can we do to improve this engine ?

At this level of quality it is not really fast and almost non interactive (3 fps on my machine in extra high quality, more than 20 fps in the low quality version). There is definitely room for performance improvement, through new and more efficient algorithms, profiling of the code eliminating code pitfalls, and reworking some of the critical paths in assembly (using latest CPU extensions).

Also, the terrain is entirely loaded in memory which is OK for a simple technical demo, but what if we want to represent a real looking world with gigs of data. Then we would have to use the LOD algorithm and push it further so that we would be able to load only the parts that are visible and at the lowest level of detail to reduce the memory footprint.

The lighting and shading is static because it is done during the authoring process by an offline renderer that isn't very fast, even if its results are top quality. We could surrender some of this quality to make an interactive dynamic lighting engine with light conditions updated in real time. We could also implement a more complex model of sky, to be able to get realistic looking sky for various times of the day or seasons, with procedural clouds and so on.

I'll finish that article here, with this list of improvements that could be implemented as an exercise of the reader. I hope to have you interested in digging this kind of engine a bit more.

Source code and executable here : voxelweb.rar (5.77Mb). Download winrar.