
GPU-Based Procedural Terrains in Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass [pdf] - dragontamer
https://gpuopen.com/gdc-presentations/2019/gdc-2019-agtd2-4-million-acres-serious-sam-4.pdf
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dragontamer
I've been going through the GDC 2019 presentations, and this one stuck out. It
seems like this game, "Serious Sam 4" is a combination of procedural
generation + quad-tree based hand-edits to the procedural generator.

The specs of the engine are quite impressive: each triangle is modeled to be
~1.5cm in size, yet they plan to cover 128km x 128km square region for the
game ("Background is not a special case"). This was estimated in the talk to
be 100TB of information if done traditionally.

Instead, they have a rough 32m x 32m tileset (only 200MB or so) that has been
handcrafted. They have a procedural-generator for converting the "rough" tiles
into detailed 1.5cm chunks, and allow another set of hand-crafted data (Quad-
tree) at the 0.25m (25cm) size for areas of interest (towns and landmarks).

All in all, it seems like a nice combination of "procedural" and "hand-
crafted".

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The section on "vegetation", was my favorite read. Procedurally generated
"impostor trees" (2d quads that look like a tree from a distance) + a
procedural geometry shader to create literally every (nearby) blade of grass

