| Submitted by , posted on 29 January 2001 |

Image Description, by Here is a picture of an old project I was working on. Its nothing spectacular today, but it was pretty good at the time. I decided that I should show it to the outside world even though it was obsolete before completion (finished about 97).
I was developing a technique to display heightmapped quads without a z-buffer. If optimized correctly, I could have made it just as fast as my ordinary textured polygon renderer.
The procedure goes something like this -
I divide the cube along its quadrants (sections sliced perpendicular to x and y axis). There are four different quadrants that parts of the cube could be in. This is important for the drawing order. The top left is draw from left to right top to down, etc.
I computed how often to sample the texture and heightmap based on the number of pixels for each side. It is sampled in a regular rectangular array( not scanlines, I tried those and it causes visual anomalies) This is a step that can save time. The polygon can be sampled every five pixels, and each of the resulting points can be connected. These can be filled with a single color. In this way, heightmap complexity can be traded for texture complexity using a consistent amount of time.

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