When you get round to the tool side would be nice to have a few more terrain textures slots to paint with
oh, i think everyone using skyline is after this one including us... We think we can pull at least 8 textures off with the system and at worst, we can just make each terrain tile use a different set of textures to achieve this.
yes, the terrain array is a little larger for editing purposes otherwise we wont be able to know what vertices belong to what cell while the brush is editing lol
End game will have less ram usage as certain arrays can be removed.
a 2048 sqrd rez terrain over "n" worldsize uses around 587mb with lods going all the way down a single square from 128x128.
Ideally, we shouldn't need to go below 8 or 4 squares across on the lowest lod. we think the current memory is still better than Gen1 terrains and can be optimized further. I reckon i can knock 200mb of the 500-600mb mark even for a 2048 res before streaming lol
The 9.6gb was a test to see what rez(8192x8192) we could get on a 16km world as the last terrain could only use a max size of 4096 even on 64bit. Theoretically with this terrain, if you have the ram, you can potentially go up to 16384+ but that would be an insane amount of ram. But streaming from file will be used eventually and should save a lot of ram. Having quick read/write to file is a must though so those with games running on an SSD will stream from disk much quicker.
Ultimately It all sits down to what is a good distance for rendering and what should the player see or how far. Using good level design to limit the view of the player and keep their interest is a must if high rez close ups are required. This doesn't help if your on top of a mountain though.
The idea is to get a good rendering distance on the terrain and have more terrain that is not yet visible. Couple that will loading and unloading tiles & lods plus streaming the data from a file on disk as we go will make the terrain far more efficient and larger with better resolution.
Our terrain is still early days and has only had 4 days work in it in between other bits, so with time it can be a kickass system designed to make what we all want out of it.