CompuServe Messages

John – The Texts and reference material we were using when Zack was writing the program leads us to believe that what we are doing can't be considered "fractal" geometry in the classic sense of the word, as everything that is generated in the peaks is really quite regular. The only real random irregular stuff in it is related to the roughness, or jagginess of how each peak can appear. Otherwise the grids are subdivided into squares, then into two triangles each. The fractal appearance I think is more related to location of any particular triangle and how the phong shader acts on it. Implementing true fractal geometry would allow us to do stuff like snow, or smoke, grass etc. But The programmer thinks too much RAM and disk space would be required to make it feasable. Not to mention the horrendous rendering times which would come along with it due to the intese densities.