Dang, Skyscrapes has gotten a lot bigger since I last saw it. Awesome.
UPDATE TIME!So I've been coding for most of the night, and I think you guys should see what I have right now. I present Project Ogreseer:
Not really much compared to the current release, but trust me, from a backend point of view, this is a MAJOR positive step. I had to do some pretty crazy mesh splitting to get OSG to even approach these speeds on my laptop. The 94fps is the worst that sexymustard and I have seen, with this little tech demo. It's a LOT smoother than OSG. Also, Ogre will support a much larger variety of hardware. The color problems will be gone, all the little hackety things that I've done -- essentially all fixed with this move to Ogre. It may be a bit before I get caught back up to where OSG was, but trust me, it will be well worth it
Along other lines -- I've been rethinking the way that Overseer draws. Right now -- both in the OSG version and this simple Ogre geometry port -- it's a tile-per-tile thing. All tiles are 1x1x1 cubes and whatever tile type it is is what shape geometry it gets. That's pretty much the current Overseer look.
I've been thinking about ways to make it look more natural, and I think I have one. It'll involve averaging things out over z-levels while pinning certain points between them, with some perlin noise mixed in. In the end, if I get the algorithm down right, it'll retain the rigid shapes of constructions while simultaneously producing naturally rolling hills and valleys.
So, there's a lot on the table now for Overseer. For all intents and purposes, I now consider the OSG branch dead. What that means is that things missing from it -- furniture, vegetation, and liquids -- won't be coming for a while (though once geometry is back up, they'll be super easy to implement this time). There's two ways I can go -- I can either do a full port with minor backend rewrite so what's seen in Ogre would essentially look like what the OSG branch looked like, or I can start working on this new geometry generator to try to get a more natural, pretty feel, though it will take longer to get the visualizer back into a "releasable" state.
So what do you guys think? Personally, I'm open to either way.