Terrain Rendering and Collision: Managing and Rendering Large Environments in Games

Terrain rendering is one of the most challenging interactive visualizations in a game application. It contains a large number of triangles which may slow down the rendering process if there is no special algorithm implemented to reduce the triangles number. There are a lot of dynamic terrain algorithms to speed up the rendering process. Most of them have only one concern: to reduce the number of triangles to be sent to GPU for processing. However, game applications nowadays are not only concerned with frame rate, they also aim to achieve good visual quality and simulate the real world. This book presents a comparison, analysis, and characterization of various type of terrain rendering algorithms which support terrain collision detection.