Handling Data Streaming & Chunk Loading for Large 3D Maps in Godot

[normalized]

@artemisia

This brings me back to attributes and their storage. I briefly tackled this in another topic, but community ( Advanced Asset Scattering - #6 by normalized )members generally prefer verified solutions rather than trying to innovate with data stream handling—specifically, going back to textures. While using textures is easier, it gives you far less control over manipulation.

You expect people on the forum to innovate for you?

There’s no mystery whatsoever in scattering stuff. It’s straightforward:

• Generate sample positions that uniformly cover the chunk using blue noise (aka poisson disk sampling)
• Reject positions based on heightmap gradient (which you always have)
• Additionally reject positions based on biome map (which you need to generate one way or another)
• Place objects on remaining positions.

Sampling the heightmap and calculating the gradient is much cheaper than doing it from a mesh.
Generating a large amount of blue noise samples is somewhat expensive for real time but if you’re only streaming the database, then you can pre-process it.