Dynamic landscape generation using page management

Abstract

Landscape visualisation is the process of recreating a natural environment and displaying it in an interactive graphical simulation. Current systems that use large datasets to represent the terrain have a number of drawbacks including large storage requirements, low level of detail and overcrowding in multiuser games. In most systems when the landscape is stored to disk the terrain area is quite small or conversely if the area is large the detail is quite low. Here an approach is described in which the terrain is procedurally generated as required. The terrain is produced in the form of blocks and displayed using an innovative page management technique. This approach allows for the generation of a detailed environment, participation by a very large number of players in multiplayer games and easy download of the environment generator via the WWW.