Re: What to do.

["J. Perkins" <jason@379.com>]

From: Chris Purnell <cjp@oit.net>
>I wan't the maps to be of an outside setting.  I started with the idea
>of using a simple highmap but that was not flexable enought.  I then
>moved towards using a tile based landscape.  But I'm not too sure about
>that.  I'm left with arbitary triangles x/y constrained within squares
>in a grid.


When I get stuck, I look at this way: either I don't really know what I
want to do, or I don't know enough to do it. Either way, the solution is
to learn more. 

Heightmaps are pretty simple, there are a ton of references around for
them, and people are doing some pretty cool stuff with them these days.
If you want to do an outdoor scene and you're stuck, you'd do well to
spend a little time researching heightfields. You can edit them using a
simple paint program, or you can find any number of cool freeware
editors on the net (or you can write one). If I were in your boat (and
frankly I wish I were), I'd write a heightfield viewer. Then you'd have a
terrain -- even if it is a simple one -- to run around on, which opens up
a whole new world of stuff to work on: objects, texturing, atmospherics,
character modeling and animation, visibility determination. And should 
it turn out that the heightfield doesn't meet your needs, at least then
you'll be able to pinpoint exactly what you want.

Of course, this $0.02 comes from someone who voluntarily set aside
working on his own game to develop yet-another-open-source-system-
wrapper, so YMMV.

Jason
379