Blog to keep everything in mind

This is the first post.

I have opened this blog for 2 reasons.

First, somebody might find the info described here useful.

Second, I will try to put this information for myself to remember everything and practice a bit in writing useful information.

Now, it's time to tell what exactly I am planning to achieve. Some may remember the game called Elite. One feature of this game that truly inspired me is that it has almost unlimited space to fly to. The universe has number of stars almost the same as real universe, and all of them are created using pseudo random sequence of data.

Next feature is that player have an ability to fly not only in space, but fly close to planet surface, and even land on it. The way how space body can be seen with quite a rich resolution when you approach closer to it is done, using techniques called "Level of Detail", or LOD. LOD algorithms add on the fly more detail to the mesh as you approach closer to it. You might want to read more about it on the wiki.

So, my start point is to make an LOD algorithm. As to the engine itself, I have chosen jME engine so to be really cross-platform, but maybe I will have to switch to OGRE rendering engine in the future. There are several issues why maybe I will have to switch to OGRE, and main of them are that OGRE have already some nice addons to handle water and sky. We'll see.