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# Terrain center vertices

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It seems like the most common approach to rendering terrain is to draw the triangles like this:
+--+--+--+
|\ |\ |\ |
| \| \| \|
+--+--+--+
|\ |\ |\ |
| \| \| \|
+--+--+--+
|\ |\ |\ |
| \| \| \|
+--+--+--+

However, this seems like because all the diagonals are facing the same direction, terrains that have been "mirrored" will not look the same, and other possible artifacts could occur in somewhat sharp corners. I was thinking about doing terrain like this instead:
+--+--+--+
|\/|\/|\/|
|/\|/\|/\|
+--+--+--+
|\/|\/|\/|
|/\|/\|/\|
+--+--+--+
|\/|\/|\/|
|/\|/\|/\|
+--+--+--+

With the center vertex's height being the average of the surrounding corners. It seems like this would be more consistent in both directions. Is this ever done, or rather, is it worth doing? If so, has anyone figured out a more efficient way to store indices/render? I know you can use GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP for the first technique but I couldn't figure out an easy way to get that to work with this. If not, what better approaches are there, or is it even worth doing differently than the first way?