Hey monkeys,
I was thinking a bit about different kinds of terrain systems or implementations of terrain and I kept coming back to a nice little way to do things that I first saw in the "Neverwinter Nights" editor.
Basically you just have basic prebuilt tiles that you can drop in and they "melt" with the surrounding tiles as much as it is possible from their basic form. So you have tiles just with grass, some with roads, some with houses, some with rocks or cliffs etc.
Of course this is a very specific type of "terrain" but it has some advantages, for example the tile system makes caching / preloading of tiles quite easy and laying out the terrain is also very easy, it could be very useful for rpg/mmo type games. Also physics collision shapes etc. could easily be simplified and stored with the tiles for seamless physics integration. On the other hand its not very useful for more "real" terrains that have long slopes or mountain-like structures.
Any opinions about the usefulness of such a system, maybe even for jme3? 
Cheers,
Normen
It might be nice as a utility sort of thing, but I think the actual usefulness of such a thing would be somewhat limited. I agree though, that it would be great for a situation where you want very flat terrain.
Maybe one could even combine this system with a "normal" terrain engine with slopes etc… hmmm…
I think its a bit too domain-specific, probably not something you would want for a general purpose terrain engine.
When I imagine terrain I think of tile-based texture splatted terrain with objects placed on the tiles. I guess it's similar to your way except the tiles don't "blend in" and can't be re-used.
I know its a very specific kind of terrain but I just wanted to take it as an inspiration since I find its quite a quick and neat way to manage terrain during production and in the game. Of course it should not be as restricted as it is in NWN…
In an "extended" version the normal texture-splattet terrain you mention would be larger tiles and loaded in the 9x9 way. Now the smaller tiles are really just groups of objects that the designer can place on the larger terrain blocks. This way designers can build nice combinations of objects and the system can manage them in the most efficient way.
But maybe then again just caching the single objects you can place on the 9x9 terrain would be just as efficient… Just trying to think from the design/creation side here as well… Maybe its just nice to have groups of objects but not let them be specific "tiles" or something.
Momoko_Fan said:
I think its a bit too domain-specific, probably not something you would want for a general purpose terrain engine.
When I imagine terrain I think of tile-based texture splatted terrain with objects placed on the tiles. I guess it's similar to your way except the tiles don't "blend in" and can't be re-used.
The tiles can be reused if the tile is a regular grid of heights. To do so just re populate the heights, calculate the normals, adjust the translation ( presuming the tile has gone out of view and THIS tile represents a tile on the forward moving horizon ) and specify the rendering/scene objects etc.
Wont be any gain however if the tile is uniformed from a modelling package