I am trying to learn about terrains. I know how to make them, and know how to get them into WED and so forth, however I was wondering if anyone could explain, or else lead me to a link that explains how 3dgs views a terrain. What is a terrain to WED and the aknex engine? Is it a set of blocks all tied together? A set of vertecies all tied together or what? I am guessing it views the terrain as an object, but does it see it as a solid object, or is it broken down into chunks? If I was the 3d engine, or WED..the world editer..or if I was the scripting language...how would I view terrain? Not sure exactly how to ask the question, but basicly..to the 3dgs what is a terrain?
We make it and add it into our script, but once we add it to a script or into WED ... what is 3dgs view of what we just handed to it?

from what i gathered from the manual, the engine sees a terrain as a mesh. or a series of vertices tied together. i know, that the large the space is between two vertices the more likely another entity is to pass thru.

so i would guess that it's solid along the tie lines, like walking on a net.
also, by default the engine will 'chunk' the terrain in sections so the engine can better digest it. you have to turn off chucking in order to dynamically deform the mesh.

i may be wrong in all of this, but that's how i interpreted the manual.

perhaps someone with a better understanding will confirm or correct me.

You are right, however as for the collision and the 'net' theory, did you have any problems with that? I never had my player fall through the terrain or any of my other entities ...

Cheers

i did once, when i had a model scaled really small. at the start of the level, the model would sort of sink into the terrain, and i could run around the bottom of it for a while, but once i resize the model to normal, the sink effect stopped.

Okey, but that hasn't got much to do with the terrain itself I think, it could have been your code... The code should match your model's size, when you are adjusting the model it's z height with a trace function, so yes size matters.

Cheers