Playing around

I've been getting rather far afield with what I initially planned for this thing, but that is typical for me. Here is a new image. Couple things about it.

1) It's a fully 3D version of the procedurally generated mountains I made for the 2D top down overmap. Same exact mountains, slightly modified so that the generation routine exports a mesh geometry as well as the color map.

2) I'm playing with the idea of doing the overmap in this style: 3D, with perspective.

3) The above test was done with the Irrlicht engine. I looked at the engine several years ago and it roused my curiosity. I've been thinking of dumping a good part of my code base in favor of a 'finished' engine such as Irrlicht, due to the rather incomplete nature of many of my systems. When it comes to the boring details, I'm not a very thorough implementer. I'll code just enough of a skeleton framework to have it come back and bit me in the ass when it's time to refine the project and make it more robust.

However, I do need to implement some things if I decide to use Irrlicht. Due to the nature of my levels (randomly generated, pieced-together meshes) the existing scene node types (particularly their Octree implementation, which is weird) are not suitable I'm working on a quad tree structure which should be sufficient for my needs, since it will essentially be a 2D game in that it won't have Z levels or fully explorable structures or anything like that.

Still not 100% decided about anything, though.