LatkaXtreme

Glad you could fix your mic problem, great episode as always! One thing that I noticed, is that I don't think the "terrain wobbling" is caused by texture calculations. I'm abou 80% sure, that what we're seeing there is a tesselation glitch. Terrains as huge as this needs to be optimized, because a fully modelled terrain would contain too much vertex data for GPU memory (especially 10 years ago), but splitting them in chunks and using LOD (Level of detail) meshes would become too obvious and ugly. So what they do is they usually store the terrain data in a heighmap texture, and calculate the vertex positions by using that. But because they still couldn't afford too much vertices, the further the terrain is to the camera, the less vertices they render. The reason the "wobbling" is so obvious - while in other games it's seamless - is because my guess is they went with the simple approach of using a perfect grid for the terrain, and they move the vertices up-and-down. While in other games, the wireframe for terrains might look chaotic, but they "flow" with the terrain's surface, so it's not that noticable. And because it's a perfect grid, when the character moves closer to the edge of the "higher resoluion" area, the engine updates the terrain mesh, and some new vertices "pop out" because there were no vertices in the previous frame in those world positions, while other new vertices probably get created close to the surface of the previous frame's calculated terrain. Hope I could explain that clearly.