Hello, I'm new to programming and I'm trying to implement little Advance Wars type of game in OpenGL. I have a working heightmap sized 256x256 where the units are and I have enabled mouse picking via glRenderPixels and I can already move the units in the world space via pathfinding and mouse. However, I have major problem. I do not know the method to render mouse cursor onto the heightmap. I assume this could be done via projection like shadows, but wouldn't the cursor texture get skewed? I was guessing projections since it sounds easiest. So, Are there any ways to render the mouse cursor without using the coordinates of the terrain, and simply magically projecting it on it? I have this last resort where the mouse cursor would be rendered on the terrain via the terrain coords, but this would require little storing the terrain in memory, which is bad since i use vbos. I wonder how this is done in commercial games such as Command & Conquer Generals and Warcraft3? I checked the faq and this was in there. I'd appreciate any pointers and help. Thanks.

This texture splatting is way over my head, but I will try to investigate further into it. Any other ideas? There had to some way people did it before vertex shaders because I'm sure some games had it before shader times.

I'm really just beginning 3D Graphics coding myself, but aren't decals the way to go for you here?

A texture 'hovering' over the Terrain?

I figured it out and ended up drawing a quad hovering on terrain. Unfortunately this doesn't work well on very steep surfaces but its a start.