Solid rendering

Up until now I've been rendering everything wireframe. And even then, I've been only rendering the 'top' faces of my terrain heightmap. Last night I decided to spend a bit of time on the cosmetics - in the hope that it'll make development a little more fun in future iterations. So there were four main things achieved:

• add a skybox. It doesn't do much, but it's how I want rendering to fill in the blanks in future, so something needs to be there now, even if it's just flat-shaded-blue.
• render the sides of the terrain. This turned out to be harder than I expected, as the terrain is not a simple rectilinear AABB problem, and there was a bug in one of my normal calculations that had me pulling my hair out for a good hour or two.
• add some demo lighting. While not my intended final implementation, I've used a cheap OpenGL light to simulate the motion of the sun. Seeing the effect of this on the terrain was really rather cool!
• add some texturing. A sample texture pasted on everything revealed some interesting artifacts leftover from the terrain generator.
  It was immensely satisfying to see what I'd previously only seen in wireframe rendered solid (and without the ugly normal glitch it started out with). Good stuff.
  
  Tonight I will probably take a break from the coding for a little while and continue work on some artwork. In the meantime that gives me a bit of space in which to consider a few of the issues I have to overcome in the next few steps:
  
  • Client/Server movement prediction & sanity checking.
  • Texture orientation