EasyGame Lesson05 – Skybox and Terrain

For the outdoor level, the sky and terrain are always necessary. For the sky, a sky doom or sky box that with a huge size in a fixed position or  move with the player camera, both of them could work well. And we always render the sky in the last order during solid objects rendering pass. Because this way we could skip and discard some screen pixel with easy-z culling process that overlap from the sky.

For the terrain, you could do with the most simple one as this sample shows or something more complicated with some professional terrain tools. With those tools, you could not only paint them look really cool, but also more fanatic material settings. With the multiple texture blending, you could figure the texture base on the terrain height. And the same time, you could still figure out a a road on it. For more details, you could refer to UDK or Maya Terrain plug-in.

This sample shows us a simple sky box and a terrain.

 

Lines appear on the box edge

As you see from the above diagram, some box edges appear. You need to change the texture address mode to CLAMP_TO_EDGE, this will make no texture border color sampled.

MFC could not work well with glaux library in VS2008
I noticed that it seems some memory leak happen when I used MFC and glaux library at the same time. To make the whole program become more lean, I have to remove the MFC library.

 

The full source code could be found from here.