Continuous Level Of Detail terrain

I have recently re-started to work on my terrain engine from 2 years ago. This time it's DX11 only, and I've managed to finally get the geometry just right.

The problems:
I had been battling with the vertices for so long, not exactly sure what was causing all the artifacts I was having: stripes, background appearing in front of foreground objects, vertex being culled for (apparent) no reason and finally holes in the geometry (patch).

The first one (the stripes) and second one were due to not setting depth writes (duh, I was tired), I finally caught that after plowing through dozens of rasterizer states. My objects (terrain tiles) were actually sorted from front to back so the bug was somewhat hard to track.

It was certainly not helped by the wrong vertex winding order (I should have read the doc more carefully): I always wind my vertices in counter-clockwise fashion (maybe an old OpenGL habit). But in DirectX 11 it's not the default, so I turned "counter clockwise is front" to true in the rasterizer.

That was not the end of the road, as the code to draw the terrain patches was very old and back then I was very much debuting my programming career; so not so many comments, lots of "magic" values and a questionable sense of object orientation. Which means now that my patches were drawing I had one triangle missing in each quad. Turns out I had a similar problem on an OpenGL game I developed for Epitech recently (the R-Type) and it had to do with the index size.

Short version is: check that the number of vertices you store in those vertex buffers are < 65536 if you are going to use DXGI_FORMAT_R16_UINT, and don't hard code that enum, but make it dynamic so that if you have less than those vertices you can enjoy a smaller buffer, while when you go over that you switch seamlessly to R32_UINT.

The implementation:
I chose MJP's framework to rebase my algorithm, so that I have a solid base to start off. The algorithm is based on Philip Strugar's paper on CDLOD terrain and I've adapted a few things to make it simpler to implement (at least for me), as I was trying to get it working before trying to optimize it.

So what's the result ? Here's a video showing what I have so far:

Next I'll be working on the shading of the terrain, and making it larger. I'm deciding between two routes for the texturing technique: one massive texture (think 16kx16k +) that is broken down in mip-maps that are paged in when required (a la Rage but not quite) or a procedural texture splatting technique which is a classic in this domain.
Personally, the procedural texture is going to be easier to implement at first, and it would be a nice complement to a procedural terrain. Then I should be able to add a mega texture on top for all those unique features an artist would want to put in.