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!