Brendan Duncan#
A companion to Taos Engine: Building a Modern WebGPU Game Engine.
Status#
This book is a work in progress. Chapters are added as the geo subsystem evolves.
What this book is about#
The geo subsystem in src/geo/ streams real-world geospatial data — photoreal city meshes, building footprints, planetary terrain, satellite imagery — and draws the actual Earth (and the Moon) at scale, from orbit down to a street corner.
Doing that on a GPU is mostly a fight with scale and precision. This book covers the techniques that make it work: a floating origin in double precision, level-of-detail streaming driven by screen-space error, and a tile cache that keeps the working set inside a memory budget.
| Chapter | What we build |
|---|---|
| Geospatial Streaming | GeoFrame floating origin, 3D Tiles and quantized-mesh streaming, screen-space error, the tile cache, GeoScene and GeoFeature |
Before you start#
This book assumes the core book as background, especially:
- Taos Engine Chapter 3: Rendering Architecture — render graph,
RenderFeatures, and reversed-Z depth - Taos Engine Chapter 17: Physics — colliders on streamed terrain
- Taos Engine Chapter 18: Performance — budgets and culling
Related reading#
- Heightmap Terrain — the engine's continuous terrain for made-up worlds
- Sample deep dives built on geo streaming: Geo Fox in the Rain, Geo Voxel World, and Geo GIS Explorer