Initial Land Modification and Dirt Movement

One of my main inspirations for this project was to create a program where a user could control an Excavator and physically alter the land in the environment.  This process is one of the main foundations for this project.  Alteration includes height modification, texture deformation, and color desaturation.  (Shifting colors towards grey)

This feature still has some smoothing out to do.  For realistic implementation, IE a large land map with small machines, subdivisions will be required for accurate results.  Implementing efficient subdivision is a goal for this project, but it will be very tricky to keep an efficient system for seamless alteration. 

Another related system to the excavator simulation is falling dirt from the bucket of the machine.  So far I have a simple implementation using a texture band that has a beginning, looping middle, and end texture.  The falling dirt adds also back into the land map where it falls.  This system is quite simple to implement in conjunction with the excavation process.  For each update I am already checking what grid space the bucket is above, and the distance from the ground surface.  These are the only external parameters needed for the falling dirt.

This gives a nice effect, but is not quite realistic enough.  I am going to work on implementing this effect with more dynamic point sprites that are also partially animated.  Though this current system is still quite useful, as it could be easily adapted to be used for a conveyer belt system (part of any mining operation or processing facility)