Terrain size limitation

#21 Well, maybe hacking together a new custom terrain class can be easier than hacking the existing one, depending on your needs. I remember one fellow developer who wrote an Warcraft III-like tile-based terrain, with lightmap support. There might even be some nice open source terrain code out there that might be useful. And the FxRenderObject and FxCollisionObject resources are nice ways to see how to add new custom objects that are both renderable and collideable.

#22 Has anyone in the community attempted this since late 2005?

#23 I would be more interisted in more sizes allowed for the TEXTURES than the terrain size of one square.

#24 Just a few questions in trying to understand how this is working... so

1) are the 256 squares constant?

2) where is the number of terrain squares defined?

3) how far off from reality am I? explained below.

It makes sense if the number of squares is constant changeign the size of the sqaures gets you more area, but then your terrain cannot have as much definition to it.

It would make sense, to change it from a constant 256 to a variable as in NumberSquares=(TerrainSize/Squaresize), and create a variable for terrain size something like TerrainSize.

so... instead of having your terrains size = (squareSize * 256)... say you could have terrainsize = 4096, set your squaresize to say... 4 so you can have some nicely sculpted terrain and let the code figure out it will need to make 1024 squares in the grid right?

squaresize is only called 20 some times for terrain rendering, lighting, and water all added up it looks like I can imagine this might lead to some higher load times (which for single player games could be optimized back into a reasonable length) and it might not be a good solution for MMO's but maybe be an approch the community could tackle together for other types of games, the larger terrain size seems to be in demand since TGE's inception

#25 Probably easier to buy TGEA and try to shoehorn in Atlas2. :)

#26 I guess I'll fiddle around with it some, I was hoping one of the GG guys that have messed with the terrain might give me some insight.

I already have TGEA and well, really I just want to modify TGE's terrain to this...

can anyone answer those questions above?

Edit: Shpelling

#27 Pretty much the best answer for mmorpgs or any game that needs a huge area is zoning. At standard square 8 and 256 block size it takes about 2.5 minutes to travel fully from one half of the map to the other (at max walking speed). I think for most games that use zones thats pretty decently sized. Outside of that where you must have that 4000k terrain, you're really going to have to work with atlas2. What would be more important for me is higher res textures with multiple bump map support over bigger maps. You could however make any sized map out of difs... That of course would be a nightmare and lighting would take forever, among other issues..