Cashgen - (kinda) Infinite Procedural World Generator

[mid_gen]

@MichaelWion;728892

Just to clarify, I was hoping to do this in the game thread. Slopes aren’t super-important, just as long as I can return the (Z)-height of an (XY)-point from a CGTile to make it easy to place foliage on a tile’s surface.
An example of such a function would be: auto fSurfaceZ = myCGTile->GetHeightAtPoint(x, y); myTree->SetActorLocation(x, y, fSurfaceZ);
Is height information stored anywhere in your code, perhaps on a per-tile basis? Because then it should be as simple as exposing this information to other classes/blueprints.
Or maybe to coincide with what I’m doing, whilst keeping it thread-safe, perhaps a multicast delegate could be triggered once a tile’s height information is generated, passing out a copy of the data?
That way, the information can be discarded for those who don’t care about it, whereas others can store this info however they wish.

I suppose if raycasts (ie, UWorld::LineTraceSingleByChannel) are more efficient than any other solution, then sadly, I’ll have to go with that.
But I’ve read that they get expensive rather quickly, which is why I figured it was worth asking you if a better alternative was potentially present.

The heightmap and mesh data is managed by a pool in CGTerrainManager so once it’s been used to render the terrain, it’ll get re-used by another job.

If you want to place things accurately on the surface of the terrain though, you’ll need to raycast. You can’t just use the noise generator to get the surface height because the actual position of the mesh at that point will be different everywhere but right on a vertex. The advantage of the ray cast is that you get the normal.

This was done by raycasting :

WIP Procedural Generation - 2016-09-03