I’m curious to see how other people go about taking different terrains or scenes theyve created and merging them to make their game world. If I have 9 separate terrain chunks, either created in blender or the SDK terrain editor, would I be better off connecting them in code or in the model editor?
What I plan to do is make a giant heightmap, divide it into 3x3 chunks, and create a 512x512 terrain for each chunk of the map to make up my world. If I scale down my models it should make the world look big enough
Yes, you should merge terrain into one geometry as well as all other static scene elements, because it is not good to have many small objects on scene. There is just one condition: merged objects should have the same material.
If your scene is created dynamically by some editor or it is a randomly generated level you can do it in code using GeometryBatchFactory.
Ok that makes sense. Would jme be able to handle a 4000x4000 terrain size if I use LOD? I guess instead of using blender or the terrain editor ill just create my terrain in code with the heightmap so I don’t have to go through splitting it up into chunks
May be it’s a ridiculous idea. How if you take picture from top of your terrain created on blender than combine every chunk with photoshop. Then use it for terrain on jmonkeyengine.?
Well with a few hacks I was able to display a 16kx16 terrain, however physics was done chunked and rendering was done totally by the gpu. I used this approach: XNA Large Terrain | skytiger
I ended up using a 1024x1024 heightmap image for my world. It’s big enough and with some culling it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll end up using blender for caves and things like that.