Then again...

... I'm not sure if this whole marching cubes thing is the best way to go about things. I want a situation where the players avatar is standing on a 'platform', and can pull a piece of ground in front up them up to form a protective shield. Or raise the ground they are standing on to be able to jump to a higher ledge, or lower the ground etc... And while marching squares can easily generate the outline of these regions, considering the fact that I want to add sides to these regions, sides that aren't of uniform depth, there might be nicer ways to do this. Especially considering how much geometry would have to be sent to the card.

At the moment I'm thinking of a traditional height map stored in a texture, using the vertex shader to displace the mesh vertices and calculate normals. Combine this with some clever texturing and it might result in rather nice looking stuff. No idea how expensive it is to send a new texture to the card every frame though. Experiments will show how good an idea this is.

The thing about this is how I represent it logically. Probably in much the same way. How I manipulate it should be interesting...

As an aside, writing all this stuff down really helps you find the holes in things. At the beginning of writing this post I had planned on writing about a VERY different idea, but it turned out to be just silly.

I would really hope to have more screens soon. And a name. It's not a game if it doesn't have a name. [smile]