Archimedes

With a lever and a place to stand, Archimedes could move the world. One wonders whether he, too, was trying to avoid z-buffer imprecision.

In a world that’s 20 kilometers on a side, OpenGL really doesn’t like looking at things which are very far from the middle;  all sorts of little glitches pop up as you move away from zero, mostly to do with penetrating objects, such as where water meets the land.  So I’m now moving the whole world around as the camera moves, to keep the camera and everything nearby within a few hundred meters of zero.  Oddly, the most difficult bit to make work with all this were the clouds and the water ripples.

I guess that water and water vapour don’t respond very well to the application of a lever.