What is the best way in making massive terrain? Not the infinite tiled terrain. I only use the infinite for the ocean part. I'm working on a simple hybrid type RST/FPS war simulation game where in I'll be having aircraft like jets that can fly fast.
My plan was to make 2 massive island and few small once separated by the ocean making it more massive. But still making transportation possible with aircraft.

My current test map's size is just a quarter of my target total land size. It uses a 128x128 hmap and colormap. Imported in med 65535x65535 terrain size, 183x183 face size, scaled to 50x50x40. Problem with this is when I'm in a ground unit the terrain polygon shakes allot. I have set my camera clip far to 130000*5 allowing me to see big part of the map while in aircraft mode. Having large view range will load more of the terrain's triangle and I don't want to use up my polygon count on the terrain alone. I already plane my map to be a desert type map, that way I don't have to think much about terrain entity and will concentrate more one the code it self.

I was hoping to make multiple tiled terrain but don't have no idea where to start. Specially from making several terrains that will tile nicely. And does 3DGS have a terrain LOD feature that will reduce terrain face at far from without cutting off faces from my current position?

Sorry for bumping in my own thread but I don't think I can find my answer this way. Does anyone remember the link of the old code for terrain stitching?

it was called as terrain sewer, and you should search AUMs for it. I have it somewhere saved. but it is very simple, just set neighbouring terrains neighbouring vertices z value to their average by ent_getvertex/ent_setvertex. imo using more terrains is what you need, far away terrains can be clipped for better performance. only pro edition features terrain lod, but it is not perfect. but it will be very difficult to realize a level that looks great from close view near ground, and from high altitude, beside good performance. a while ago I saw a post about streaming entities, but don't know whether ti works or not... it would be great to have this feature. imo it is not too powerful to use huge view distances and huge worlds in gamestudio, but maybe someone else has more experience than I have in this area...

Found it in AUM84 plug and play. Regarding terrain LoD, I better find another way without pro features. I'm still researching more about huge world without eating much of my resources and performance for the terrain alone. I also feel that using large view range is not a good idea for a game. Besides, I miss a very important part in planning my game, the unit measurement. Thanks sivan.

Hi, you can make what you want by determining what the camera view will see and load your meshes to suit that view only.
For example, travelling from island to island will involve covering an ocean with cloud layers possibly but all thats needed is a tiling ocean untill you actually get to see your target island, then apply a simple ent_morph for your lod stages or make your own lods and load them acording to vec_dist.

Once you take off you can then apply camera view to effect culling or poly clipping when models or terrains are outside of the camera view ro simply swap out for a low res file in place of a 'close up' high res file...

Your view over distance can be effected by carefully sculpting a suitable skybox scene mixed with an image of the view you want the player to see untill you need to add the models or terrains.
If you are not using the terrains for close up view then you dont really need them as they add a fair amount of wieght to the performance so swap out terrains for models when needed.

Hopefully Im on the right track here and perhaps offering usefull suggestions...

Thanks allot nems. I'll add that up to my paper. I also checked allot of games that use massive terrains like aces high 2 and FC3. They use plain skybox and just blend in the far clipped terrain with the horizon color using fog which have the same color as the horizon. I was planning to use morph for lod but i'm not sure how it reacts with stitched terrain. For all this I have to build my own map builder but will be easy thanks to sir sivan's map builder.

One thing that's giving me problem though, some of my units usually air are a physics entity. I'm still A7 user so I use ODE. When a physics entity gets to far enough from the world origin, the objects starts to jitter or shake. Not really noticesable in 3rd person view but in FP view I feel like my aircraft I about to fall apart since each aircraft have it's separate cockpit model and will adopt the aircrafts angle and coordinate. Is there a way to prevent the attached entity from shaking?

Wow - Physics plains? Morph for terrain lod? I'm confused but, hey if it works. Try releasing the entities from the physics engine and controlling them as normal.

I would respecfully suggest model planes to counter all the probs you are facing as then you can control every element of the planes behaviour with precision, as for stiched terrains, there is a code than can sticht together terrains with relative ease in the AUMs provided by an expert user here, great little prog but I have personally never used the function so cant help there...

morph is good for a lot of objects but so is ent_create and destroy...

What I would suggest is to manufacture model terrains if you are not going to have your player walk the terrains, then you can set the edges with the right amount of vertices while lowering the 'feature' parts of the model terrain so that any area with a flat aspect could be just one quad and the mountainouse features taking up the necessary poly's to adequatly describe inherent apearances then morph as the vehicle gets close enough to notice features.

It would save you a tremendouse amount of fps as models do not carry the inbuilt functions that come with terrain use but can be made to appear that they do with mips, etc or alternatly, set your terrain non dynamic to save heavy calls if that can be done.

Fog can be made with alpha's but again they carry a lot of overheads but it is a technique I have used successfully in the past and with great realism, its just that from the air, you would get a greater camera view than if you were grounded and thusly more engine resources used just to get the scene seen right.

Check out Google Maps for far terrain loooks too, they do a great job of using lods...
Edit
I forgot to mention, to save the jitters from distance to origin problems, have your players etc stationary and move the 'whole world' to keep all objects close to the origin...That is, your world and all its elements do the moving...

I just got the time to get back in my project's terrain. I already made all necessary measurement for my map base on the physics engine's limit. I will be able to achieve 4m X 4m quants of world. Put in 1 inch/quant it would be more or less 63x63 miles. Inaccurate computation. If i'll divide the map in to 10km/node I will need 100nods each with 3-4LoD model for morphing. 300-400 hmp for terrain. Center 8x8 nods will cover land, the rest of the outside nodes will be flyable open sea, additional node for none flyable area or will kill player when the get off the flyable area to make it like a very large ocean. Modeling each terrain that will tile perfectly with each other since stitching won't work this way. Seems like allot of work for making the terrains alone. but that doesn't bother me. Only thing that bother me is loading terrain when needed and unloading when not needed to save memory. It might lag the game when ever terrains are loaded and unloaded.

Long way to go just to know if it would work. But if it does I would be more than happy to share it in case someone else want to make games that use large terrains like a complex flight sim.

The cockpit jitter got something to do with the float coordinates accuracy and notice that camera isn't shaking so instead of attaching the camera in the cockpit, I do it the other way around.