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 terrain system evolves.
What this book is about#
Voxel worlds are one way to build a landscape. For very large outdoor worlds, where the player walks across the ground rather than digging into it, the engine uses a second, entirely separate system: a continuous heightmap terrain renderer in src/terrain/.
This book covers that system — continuous level of detail with no popping or cracks, virtually textured heightmaps streamed across a world larger than GPU memory, PBR splat materials, and GPU-driven indirect drawing with no per-frame CPU readback.
| Chapter | What we build |
|---|---|
| Heightmap Terrain System | TerrainSystem: CDLOD quadtree, virtual texturing, page streaming, splat materials, heightmap sources, bounded terrain |
Before you start#
This book assumes the core book as background, especially:
- Taos Engine Chapter 3: Rendering Architecture — render graph, passes, and
RenderFeatures - Taos Engine Chapter 6: Materials and Chapter 8: Shadows — the PBR and cascade-shadow paths the terrain feeds into
- Taos Engine Chapter 18: Performance — indirect drawing and GPU culling
Related reading#
- Geospatial Streaming — streaming real-world terrain at planetary scale
- Sample deep dives that use this terrain: Terrain — CDLOD GPU terrain rendering and Grassy Hills — Infinite Terrain