ah for the preventing the popping stuff and terrain in general. i’d like to point once more to the ranger mkII (plz david dont cut off my head)
http://web.interware.hu/bandi/ranger.html
and dont be deceived by the nice bumpmap. just switch over to wireframe mode and you’ll see the truth. but even there is still room for improvement, first one: write it as vertex shader so the cpu wont be loaded with it. and second. a second vertex shader (or include it all into one) to smooth the vertex-movement.
the whole algorithm seems to be not all too different from the current one in panda (except that it is a real circle) and i think some more stuff.
just wanted to remind the people to not foreget about this one =)
anyway. a small vertex shader which keeps the “old” and the “updated” terrain-mesh in memory and smoothes the new-placed vertices along the zaxis to their new position (the movement should only be done when the camera is moveing) it should be able to prevent popping quite nice while keeping the current algorithm=) so any shaderspecialists volunteering?