I've been thinking about this for a while and I am kinda getting to the "code something and see if it bloody works" stage, but I want to have a chat about it with youguys first.
The problem I am trying to get my head around is the shear scale of things. I've written planetary terrain systems in the past, but they don't require that Buckingham Palace is recognisable and in the correct place.
Say I want to be able to have a theatre of operation that covers western Europe in the 1940's. Your are looking at about 1000 miles by a 1000 miles.
That's a big area. Using a 4K texture gives me a resolution of about 0.25 miles per pixel. Not very nice.
So I started thinking about using the texture pixel as the base height and adding in pseudo random noise for detail. In effect turning every pixel into a CLOD (well I'm leaning towards ROAM) patch.
Then I can have the resolution I want at the cost of a lot more processing, but at first glance it looks possible.
The next thing I thought about was visibility. If I was at ground level, then it's not too bad. Maybe an 8 by 8 set of patches would suffice.
However at 35,000 feet. The visible range is huge and I'm having to handle huge numbers of patches. Admittedly all of them would be reduced to a single quad, or at least most of them, but it's still a lot of patches.
So I started thinking about organising sets of patches into region patches, and groups of region patches into sector patches, and sector patches into country patches, and about that point I decided to go for a beer instead.
Has anyone had any expierience with a system like this?
Anyone got a better idea (Please have a better idea, pretty please with sugar on)