Building the playfield

Now that we have a fancy new style of camera, we need something to actually point it at. For Tank Battles, we are going to use height maps to generate terrain for the playfield.

Height maps

What is a height map anyway? A height map is nothing more than a 2D image that we will use to represent the height of each vertex that makes up our terrain. To generate the height maps included in the resources file for this chapter, the Clouds effect of Paint.NET (available at no cost at http://www.getpaint.net) was used on empty images of 128x128 pixels. The size of the height map image will determine the number of nodes present in the terrain when we convert the height map into vertices:

The Clouds filter of programs like Paint.NET and Photoshop produce smoothly transitioning gradients with some degree of randomization applied to them. The previous image contains a few of these randomly generated images as an example. Their smooth transition between light and dark levels makes...