The Roamsteps code base offers an introduction to implementing the ROAM algorithm for accurate, high-performance display of large terrain datasets. The ideas from the original 1997 ROAM paper have been updated significantly in many respects: the basic data structure is now the "diamond" rather than the bintree triangle; the notion of bucket-based queues is demonstrated; fast tricks with IEEE float -> int conversion are utilized; procedural terrain with lazy evaluation is supported; more stable optimization logic is given; the display triangles remain in mostly static arrays for top performance on modern graphics hardware.
The code has been compiled and tested on Linux and Win32 systems. Currently only source is provided.
Lastest: Roamsteps20020818.zip