Discussion about editable terrain
ethereumdegen opened this issue · comments
After initial investigations, it looks like the path towards making the terrain editable would be to load the heightmap (and other textures) into memory first from a path, and then load them into the terrain from memory. Right now, the terrain loader seems to load the heightmap directly from a path which is non-conducive to making it editable.
If the heightmap data were loaded into memory first and then that struct were used to build the terrain (like AddAttachmentFromMemory or something similar) then a system could be built to edit that heightmap in memory and hot-reload the tiles/chunks every ~200ms as needed. Once that is done, the only thing left to do would be to add some sort of manual or auto save/export feature that could export the heightmap in memory back out to a file as the editor desired.
thoughts?
For example , terrain config storing a path as a string is not ideal for this topology. Same goes for TileConfig. I think that disk paths need to be further decoupled in order to achieve this. Experimenting ...
Sorry for replying so late. I am still waiting for bevys asset system 2.0, before I will continue working on asset related features.
Editable terrain will be a massive change to plugin. I do not think that CPU side processing will be fast enough. We will have to move the entire preprocessing code to the GPU. Ideally in a streamable and efficient manner.