hey
I tried to use the doubling terrain technique, and had some positive results - but this would not help me in the long run, since I need to place houses and other map entities ON the terrain.. So.. I am trying to come up with a compromise to use terrains effectively..
Create a full size 1024/1024 greyscale and 2048/2048 skin. On the greyscale, make sure your lowest level (black) isnt extremelly close to other elevations in height- this allows you to have room to put in a BSP ground plate (your terrain is huge so you will have to probably split up your ground plate into 40 or so equal pieces).. Use your terrain for anything that involves slopes, hills and mountains. Use the double up effect (creating a second terrain, making it invisible and placing it slightly above your other terrain) to improve collision detection. For other things such as beaches and river beds, you might want to use blocks in WED. Terrain is also very useful for stuff you cant get to.. IE instead of putting in a background image on your sky when outdoors, just make it so that terrain covers such angles instead. Much more realistic.
Few bad points about this method?
-Good luck trying to match your ground plate texture with a nice transition to the skin you drew for your terrain.
-Terrain doesnt recieve or cast shadows, so your player will have a shadow on anything except terrain (not a good visual effect)
-Terrain still has questionable collision detection. for stuff like background terrain like I just mentioned, just section that off using invisible blocks. But dont be surprised to find a few (if not several) parts of your terrain are soft.
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Any thoughts on a better method? Am I doing something horribly horribly wrong or what?
There's got to be a way to have fully functional terrain without the use of any ground plates or blocks for outdoor scenery.