My far plane on my terrain engine is set to 1000000.0f with the near plane at 1.0f. Even with this far plane setting I can't really tell how far out it is rendering. At 500000.0f I was getting some early triangle clipping at the far plane.
So now if my quad tree can render out to 1000000.0f with a 0.5 to 1.0 frame drop then theoretically I cannot render any further right? Again this is with no LOD except for texture LOD. The settings for my quad tree are:
Magnification: 512.0f
Patches around player: 8x8 patches
Patch size: 64 x 64 cells
Cell size: 2048.0f x 2048.0f units
Size of one patch: 64 * 2048.0f units = 131,072 x 131,072 units
Size of entire render: (131,072 * 8.0f) x (131,072 * 8.0f)
Texture LOD: 50000.0f units
FPS 99.5 to 100.0f at 100Hz vsync
My question is how would I render this to make it appear curved the higher up you went in the atmosphere? It would be a linear interpolation but I'm not sure how to do it. I also need a way to LOD the 8x8 patches as you increase in height. There comes a point at which you will see the rendered 'world' as a small square regardless of how far out you render on Z. Somehow I need to solve this by moving to an LOD mode that would then only render 'patches' of flattened terrain with textures representing that portion of the world.
I'm a bit lost on how to do some of this.
You can see that in the high altitude render I'm not making use of the huge far plane. Somehow I need to make sure that regardless of height I'm always rendering out to the far plane.