I am trying to understand terrain. I spent yesterday reading about chunking, mipmaps, shaders, multitexture, etc. Of course, as a noob only some of it is sinking in. And some of these techniques were being used with older versions of 3dgs which may no longer be optimum.

Basically, I want to have terrain covering a fairly large area (25000x25000) with detail near my model. Now I could probably spend weeks learning about each of the above methods (e.g., multitexture shaders, chunking, etc), but I am hoping somebody can tell me (1) which technique is most appropriate (i.e., gets decent results without an enormous amount of effort) and (2) where I can learn how to implement it.

Thank you!

Actually SteveA, 'spending weeks' is really the best way as what you may consider good and optimised may only be relevant to your project.

Generally though there are some problems with multitexture terrains when applying stencil shadows to the character, some multitexture seems to disable or cloak shadows.

Chunking is good if you are not deforming terrain with explosions or vehicle crashes.

Mipmaps are your friend and good terrains can be accomplished with an intelligent approach (work at it rather than using ANY detail images)

Shaders should in my opinion be used very sparingly and in tightly controlled conditions.

One of the best methods for me is to individually texture each componant of the landscape like cliffs, scree slopes, river beds and so on then mip map to get an effect so close to multitexture that it looks as though it has a multi texture applied. The result is good frame rates.

Not what your looking for perhaps but essentially the way it is from my point of view.

Hope I havnt confused the issue here,

Cheers...

Thanks Nemisis. That was a good overview. My challenge has been that I spend an enormous amount of time digging for info in the somewhat weak user docs (e.g., no "chunking" in the help docs). I didn't want to spend a week on multitexture terrains only to learn that I lose shadows. I won't be deforming, so chunking is still in. It looks like it's time to research mip maps (I'm open to anyone's suggestions regarding resources about mip mapping terrrain...).

Thanks again.

Quote:

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Shaders should in my opinion be used very sparingly and in tightly controlled conditions.

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This is wrong..shaders are the normal rendering path, so just about everything should be using a shader.

When you use terrain chunking is your terrain one mesh like many demos I have seen or do you have to split up each mesh? I am trying to create a large terrain like most rpgs or mmorpgs.

Manual
Terrain is automatically nonchunked if its file name ends with "_n".
terrain_chunk = 0; // disable chunked terrain
level_load("myterrain.hmp");

So I can have my terrain as a large piece and the engine will chunk it according to script or do I have to have it all in smaller sections?

Manual
The engine's sophisticated terrain rendering algorithm unfolds its power with chunked terrain. On loading, it's divided into square chunks that are stored in a cache, are separately clipped when outside the view frustum and are rendered P in different resolution steps depending on their distance to the camera and the terrain_lod setting. This method allows for much faster terrain rendering and theoretically unlimited terrain size.