Dustin Horne XNA / .NET / Silverlight / Web

Introduction

In previous sections of this series I mentioned better culling techniques.  I wasn't going to touch upon any of these until after the series but it continued to eat away at me until I finally decided to do so.  The result was hours and hours of trial and error and a lot of mistakes along the way.  Thanks to community contribution in the AppHub forums I was able to get many of my questions answered or at least get pointed in the right direction.  I ran into several issues along the way, but eventually came up with a working solution.  More...

So far in the terrain series we've learned how to create a heightmap based terrain, leverage a quadtree to navigate our terrain data, and add progressive level of detail by using our quadtree to step away our active vertices as we move further from the camera.  Today we're going to concentrate on view frustrum culling.  We're going to avoid drawing any geometry that is not in view of the camera.  If you haven't read through the first 5 parts of this tutorial you can find them on the Terrain Table of Contents page. More...