Major Rework

I see that there's some interest in WorldShaper, so I thought I'd write up a quick update for anyone curious.

Several month's ago, I started playing around with 2d Map painting and 3D terrain generation. At that time, the editor was node-based. It was quite powerful, but the codebase was difficult to maintain so I abandoned it.

I then rewrote it with a simpler non-node-based workflow, where the program made more assumptions about how you would use the tool. It's a bit more limited, but a lot more simpler. This is the version that was uploaded to itch.

However, two major issues has caused me to rewrite it yet again. The main issue being performance and the second one being the codebase becoming a bit messy.

This next version, which will officially be called version 0.6 (but is actually the third major version for me, so 3.0....). The new version has a significant performance boost, because I have implemented two awesome features: Multi-threaded painting and sculpting as well as dynamic LOD-levels.

Multi-threading simply means that painting is applied to the maps (heightmaps, colormaps, textures etc.) seamlessly in the background.

LOD, meaning level-of-detail, is a technique of generating simpler version of an object (usually a mesh, but in our case, images as well). By default, all chunks (previously called zones) have 3 levels of detail. When you zoom out, you will see a lower resolution version of the map and when you paint on it, the changes propogate down through levels 2 and 1 in a separate thread. What exactly is propogated is not the image data, because that would mean "lossy" propogation (I.E, you would loose detail) - instead, the paint command is propogated.

LOD, combined together with the multiple threads, leads to pretty big performance gains.

So, hopefully I'll update again once I've got more progress.