Ok, so i have solved most of my issues and ended up breaking down and getting a7 professional edition. It runs fairly well, even on my garbage graphics card. I have found myself remembering quite a bit and was able to translate a lot of my prior knowledge with out too much issue. So
So, My question....Terrain sizes. I have always seen people recommend small terrain sizes to preserve frame rate. But what exactly is "small" terrain? I am in the process of building a fairly large world, bit by bit that is. I do not want to use blocks for ground because it just looks really fake. Should i go with a terrain that is 2048x2048? Can i go bigger such as 4096x4096 with out many issues? should I make them much smaller such as 1024x1024? What exactly is considered too big for a terrain? I could scale down my characters and models, but then the textures on the terrain wind up looking way too big, if I scale down the textures, they lose details so I would like to preserve the model size as it seems to be the optimum.

I would not make it bigger than 1024x1024. It may work in the engine but you'll get problems in MED creating such large terrains.

Do you mean texture size or terrain size (in vertices)?
Normally you´ll use a multitexturing shader for such purposes.

Fogman, I am referring to the size of the height map I create to import in to MED. The terrain editing in MED is pretty primitive and clumsy so I prefer to do it outside in photoshop. Using a multitexture shading is a bit beyond my abilities at the moment. I am trying to stay away from scripting for the moment, though I do realize it is inevitable i will have to learn a little to really do anything. right now, I am simply trying to get more comfortable with the world editing aspect. I have been dabbling in graphic design and 3d modeling for years and it seemed to me the natural point to start out in for now. I must say, MED and WED have improved greatly since the earlier days of a5, however, more features hasn't necessarily meant easier use. I find many things are very non-intuitive. The program doesn't do things nearly as straight forward as it should. Many things that should be very simple....aren't.

Spirit Yes, I have already run in to the issues in MED with 2024. It seems if the terrain height map is bigger then 1024 the corresponding texture I try to apply to it doesn't seem to show. So it looks like I'm stuck creating lots of small terrains and trying to stitch them together. It sounds like it is going to be a nightmare.

Don't waste your time with multiple terrains! A 1024 heightmap is big enough. Use the predefined multitexturing shader from MtlFX.c, it will take less than 10minutes to get it to work with your textures but it will save you hours of work you'd had with your current method. One big texture per terrain is outdated.

Superku....can you give me a little more detail on how to do this? I assume this is a code thing.

As I said, just use the multitexturing material that comes with ~MtlFX.c.
Include this material library and attach the action fx_terraintex (or how it is called). When you open the code file and scroll down to this action, you will see some instructions above it on how to set up your terrain.

Superku, I did that. I added a terrain to my level, included the library and attached the action to the terrain. I then opened the code file and began looking through it for the specific instructions but could find nothing even close to coherent or simple step by step instructions.

Oh, they changed the material.



Now add your textures (as skins) to your terrain, f.i. grass, rock, dirt, and create their masks on their respective alpha channels.
For a start, take a grass texture, paint the alpha channel opaque (/white), cut out a circle. Repeat this process and cut out another form from its alpha channel. Import these textures as individual skins, save, attach the function to your terrain, build and run. Now you will see the results immediately, I guess texture number one is below number two (and so on).

Ok....go with the assumption that I'm an idiot...because I really can be sometimes...lol. Keep this as simple and elementary as possible.

how? where?

Again, where? how?
I apologize sincerely, I realize I am probably frustrating you, but I really do need the instructions in a straight forward detailed manner. I would not be asking all this if there was detailed documentation. This has got to be the most poorly documented major commercial software I have ever seen.