I’ve been digging around in THREE.js and one of the bits that’s always confused me is shaders.  I’ve been writing software for some time but every time I look at shader code I just get completely confused.  I found a little “shaders for beginners” page today and it’s helped fill in some of the gaps.  The primary reason it’s so confusing (at least when using THREE.js) is that THREE.js does a lot of the grunt work for you and that hidden grunt work makes examples incomprehensible if you don’t know what THREE.js is doing in the background.  Since I understand that a bit better now it affects some design choices going forward.  For instance, I am now convinced that implementing splat maps for the terrains in Lyridia is completely doable.  It will require some custom tools to do it well but I see no reason I can’t use an essentially arbitrary number of textures for each terrain chunk and mix them together with a shader.

This is a really big deal because using textures for the terrain means I’ll need to use textures on every other asset as well.  I’m not 100% ready to pull the trigger on this yet but I definitely want the game to have as wide an appeal as possible and a world with textured assets will be more familiar to more players so the decision might be made for me already.  We’ll see.