I would venture to say that everquest uses a "model" for the terrain. Like you say, its kinda blocky, so it probably doesnt need realtime terrain LOD. They may just use an octree or quadtree to cull out from the view-frustum to keep up speed.

Other games however do use terrain LOD. I "believe" Tribes2 uses either a ROAM or Quadtree based lod of the terrain mesh.

Operation Flashpoint, which is totally sweet(get it), from my playing, uses something similar to everquest. Its blocky. However, operation flashpoint models complete island/sea areas without zoning and huge forest areas.

The only "standard" is which style of terrain you want. If you really want the smooth high detail stuff, you HAVE TO USE terrain mesh LOD along with all the other culling techniques. If you dont need the smooth details, use a model or heightfield for the mesh.

I am going for larger game areas at expence of close up detail for my project, so ill use probably a heightfield terrain without the mesh LOD.

Tribes 2 uses a really amazing terrain engine... It uses octrees (dont ask me why not just quadtrees, but thats what it does) as well as fractaly generated details and some ungodly form of LOD. What blows me away is that there is absolutely no morphing (like in Tribes 1) when you approach the terrain, and when you get up close to it the detail can be pretty high.

quote:Original post by Kranman
Tribes 2 uses a really amazing terrain engine... It uses octrees (dont ask me why not just quadtrees, but thats what it does) as well as fractaly generated details and some ungodly form of LOD. What blows me away is that there is absolutely no morphing (like in Tribes 1) when you approach the terrain, and when you get up close to it the detail can be pretty high.

It probably is morphing, actually. That''s a good thing and good terrain engines do it.

You probably mean ''popping'' which is what terrain animation/morphing is suppoed to prevent.

No, I mean morping. My point was that the morphing which it must do is not visible, as it was (very much so) in the original game.

I thought i explained why everquest uses models(or a simple heightmap). The terrain is blocky. You dont need to change the level of detail of a terrain that is so blocky, because the triangles are simple large for each vertex. If you played everquest, you would notice that LOADING OCCURS when you enter a dungeon. Why?? Because it has to load a new model(this case its not a heightfield). As to what they use in the dungeons, lets just hope they at least use an octree or bsp tree to cull inside zones!!

The terrain in EQ has caves and tunnels. I suppose this speaks against a heightmap (it could be done but i doubt it in this case).

I dont know, but id guess EQ use a mesh for each zone terrain.