I'm currently doing a terrain engine that can be devided up into tiles, each tile is made up of several 1, 4, 16, etc subdivissions depeneding on it's distance from the camera. I'm thinking of 2 diffrent ways I coule be drawing them via vertex arrays:
+---+---+---+---+
| /| /| /| /|
| / | / | / | / |
|/ |/ |/ |/ |
+---+---+---+---+
| /| /| /| /|
| / | / | / | / |
|/ |/ |/ |/ |
+---+---+---+---+
etc
or
+---+---+---+---+
|\ | /|\ | /|
| \ | / | \ | / |
| \|/ | \|/ |
+---+---+---+---+
| /|\ | /|\ |
| / | \ | / | \ |
|/ | \|/ | \|
+---+---+---+---+
The first way would be really easy to use triangle strips to draw but i think wouldnt look as good for smooth hills. The second i think would look better but would be slower as I couldn't use triangle strips/fans (using front face culling).
Any suggestions on which way (or a diffrent way) to go?