The usual reference for terrain engine is vterrain.org which is a great site with all types of ressources.

What I would expect from a modern terrain engine is to support the following features :
- support huge area of landscape with great level of detail
- look good with very high level of detail and react to lighting
- let my game engine interact easily with it
- don't eat all my processing power.

Each of these area have been adressed by lots of peopple and you will find lots of ressources. Here are some big area of research ;
- Terrain level of detail (ROAM, ROAM2, smooth geo-mipmap, geo-clipmap,...),
- Terrain data compression, paging, streaming (dynamic terrain generation, data streaming,...),
- Terrain texturing (splatting, multitexturing, procedural texturing, normal mapping for terrain, Quake 4's megatexture, texture compression, texture streaming,...), athmosphere shading (atmospheric scaterring, ...), shadowing (shadow map ; variance / percentage closer filtering, LiPSM / trapezoidal / cascaded / parallel splitted)
- Physics for terrain (don't know any, never worked on that).

nothing to say

[Edited by - swstudio2002 on May 23, 2006 9:19:08 PM]

Quote:Original post by Mike2343
Just to help people out who want to get to the links from swsudio2002 easier (btw use HTML tags):
................
*phew* Done!

I am sorry~thank you.

Quote:Original post by Mike2343
I don't know if its been mentioned but you don't really need LOD on todays hardware (unless you want it to run on a GF3 or something).

Or if you want large enough scenes... Of course it's less necessary these days but I mean, unless you're doing UT 2k3 or something you'll need some kind of LOD scheme, won't you?

Quote:Original post by Niwak
What I would expect from a modern terrain engine is to support the following features :
- support huge area of landscape with great level of detail
- look good with very high level of detail and react to lighting
- let my game engine interact easily with it
- don't eat all my processing power.

To add a few more:
- support overhangs/caves
- no popping with lod scheme (ie. geomorphing)
- realistic static and dynamic lighting
- constant FPS (using things like occlusion culling and CLOD)
- scalable between brute force rendering and highly optimized CLOD
- arbitrary view distance (!)

Quote:Original post by Mike2343
...
Honestly why do you need it?
...

averisk gave you an honest answer in the post you quoted. Many modern games and other applications don't want to be limited to such a small area as 8 square miles. Just look at something like what Ysaneya is doing and then say there's no need for terrain LOD. And if you aren't using up all of your card's vertex processing power on the terrain, you have more power to spare for using more detailed characters or other objects.

I agree that on smaller areas of terrain LOD calculations can be a bottleneck and are probably not worth it, but on larger terrains they definitely are worth it.