The Seventh World

A 4096 voxel terrain took nearly 3 seconds in debug mode to generate.  Without dynamic components it would be 16,777,216 components and would be generating long into the night.  With it, it is only 78!

Have it working in real-time now.  The small white sphere is the viewer.  It still needs refining, instead of deleting components and then creating a new one I'll probably add the components to a "re-purpose" list.  It will save a bit of time, mainly in the creating of a new model and voxel node memory pools.  Other than that there are a few minor memory leaks.

This is all in debug mode too.

Promising results with a 4096x4096x4096 terrain.  Takes up about 14GB of memory but the creation and updating process are very fast.

Thinking about it, 14GB seemed way to high and I was right - the problem was I was setting up a components node pool like this;

voxel_pages = make_shared<VoxelPages>(node->bounds.size);

Using the bounds size when they were only small (16m to 32m) were fine but when I made components as big as the terrain itself (4096m) it wasn't a good idea.  Some components were allocating 2048*2048 page size, so about 4 million nodes at one (1.6GB) and it only used a dozen of them from the pool.

Making each page the size of the component fixed it right up.

voxel_pages = make_shared<VoxelPages>(component_size);

The 4K terrain now only uses 800MB.  

Fixed a few issues.  I was only allocating enough voxel memory pages for the final level of subdivision that represented the surface.  I didn't take into account the fact that I needed space for the all their parent nodes too.

Also have finally removed double vertices with the TransVoxel method.  In one scene there was 108k vertices, after the fix it went down to 30k.  About a 72% decrease!

Very nice!