High detail L3DT texture maps

#1 A TX/HF ratio of 8 should be good for most FPS games. Also keep in mind the Square Size (game units per pixel) that you are importing your heightmap with. That will cut down your actual game TX/HF ratio. If you are importing with the default of 2, then you actual game TX/HF ratio is now only 4 since your HF is twice as big in the game.

That being said, I don't think you're going to see a big improvement. What you're describing it a combination problem with L3DT and TGEA. Both of these tools texture the terrain from the "top down" only. That means steep cliff faces get only a few pixels of texture to stretch over themselves. If you are looking straight down at the map, like L3DT does, then everything looks fine. However, in the 3D environment, what you see is a few pixels "smeared" down the cliff face.

What really needs to happen is to modify the Atlas texture rendering routines to render the texture oriented to the normal of the terrain's poly face. I thought I saw someone post in the "Engine" area that they had a prototype of this working. If that were in place then cliff faces and steep inclines would get their proper due worth of texture space. However, you would still have the problem that L3DT doesn't give you enough texture space. You would have to modify the terrain texture to prep it to be "wrapped" on to the terrain much like texture skins for 3D models.

#2 Another problem is that the exporter is a little tricky to use. So even with a ratio of 16 it might look very bad just because the highest use texture resolution on the atlas2 terrain is not the one you actually generated but a ratio 4 mipmap and similar ...

#3 You might want to check out this thread. It helped me get much nicer detail on my terrains:

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=58378

#4 Aha, now that looks very interesting! Thanks Jerane! I'll take a proper look at that tomorrow.