I know that there has been enough talking about terrain texturing, but yesterday I played BattleField 1942 for the first time and was really impressed. Their terrain looks SOOOO cool! Does anyone know which technique they use? Or can anyone guess? What I found out so far is that they tile a detail texture over the whole thing. But I don''t have any ideas about the real texture. In my opinion a simple XXL-UBER-LARGE texture can''t be used because the terrain is too big (Textures of 65536x65536 aren''t possible! ;-) ) Here''s a little screenshot: Thanks for your thoughts!

Aha I was impressed too, I play the BF1942 Desert Combat mod way way too much, but any way here''s what I know.

The terrain texture is pretty much a ''uber'' texture, except that it''s split into 1024x1024 chunks - on the larger maps there might be 8x8 of these, stored as dxt1 compressed dds files.

Besides these uber textures(which are pre-lit with shadows from static objects btw) there''s ONE generic detail texture wrapped multiple times across the chunks(you guessed this right).

No sure on the LOD going on, but it''s appears simple and only comes into play at the larger distances(which are usually masked almost totally by the infernal fog). It does use a heightmap, but of 16bit values.

If you''d like to know more I suggest reading up at the Map Editing section of http://www.bf42.com/.

Chapel

On a side note, how do you suppose they stored the heightmap for this thing? Judging by the degree of detail on the slopes and tiny bumps, it looks like a huge 2d array of height values, but again it would have to be like 65k x 65k, wouldn't that chew up all the memory just for the map?

[edited by - aargyle on April 29, 2003 4:55:59 AM]