Hi @ll, I am planning on programming a little mini-game sort of toy-boat-racing. For that, I need terrain to form the coastline and water. Question is: can I model the terrain with 3DS Max 5 and simply load it ? Or is generated terrain the better solution ? I also want to put objects on the terrain like a beach-house or vegetation. How can I do that eg. trees modelled with 3DS Max 5 ? How can I make them appear on my terrain, adjusted to the height of the terrain ? Can objects like houses or trees als be converted to *.md3 or is this just suitable for humanlike-models ? The preferred API is OpenGL. Thankx in advance, bye, Leoric

If you model the whole terrain with trees and your beach house and everything and save it as a .3ds it''s possible to retrive it all as different objects. The good thing is that everything is already placed on the terrain as you want everything to be. The bad thing is that you have to make your own loader/converter to get the data in your own specific format but their is loads of .3ds loaders and information on the internet, just try google. :-)
When you then have your data in memory it''s good to make some kind of tree to have your data in. It''s not that smart just to render the whole landscape with every object every frame. Just cut it up in smaller chunks and render everything that visible. You can also make an object that represent your water. Just use this object to place your water on because then it''s easier to calculate how the water moves and breakes against the shore.
Their is loads of ways to do this, perhaps this isn''t the best but it would quite easy to make something quite fast this way.
Good luck and don''t forget to alert us when you have a playable demo finished. :-D