Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 11Generating a Terrain

In this chapter, you'll learn how to create a 3D terrain for your game. Terrains are an excellent way to represent outdoor environments. They can be generated at random or stored in and loaded from a 2D grayscale image, called a height map.

The chapter explains how you can create a terrain based on a height map. In each grid point or vertex of your terrain, you will also provide extra information such as the normal and tangent. This information will be needed by your effect, where you implement correct lighting on your terrain and enhance its appearance.

To give a photorealistic look to the terrain, you're also going to implement multitexturing in your HLSL effect (HLSL effects were introduced in Chapter 9). To ...