Anyways, enough rambling:


What you're seeing in these hideous screenshots is a simple paged terrain system. It has normals/tangents and you can produce bitangents ("binormals") in the shader like I did here. The reason why it's so god forsaken ugly is that I never did get the shader to work right so the shadowing caused by normal-mapping there is pretty ugly.
Working features:
- LOD with GeoMipMapping just like TSM/PLSM
- Inter-Page LOD - that is, the Tiles at the edge of the Page will get info from neighboring page's tile's and stitch accordingly, so no gaps.
- Uses Libnoise to generate height information at run-time and will have a lot of plug-in features as I'll list shortly.
- Easy to access the Vertex/Index buffers for tiles to feed to your physics engine.
- As stated, it's a Paged system, so it has Pages of Tiles (in my case a Page is 513 vertices wide and has 8x8 Tiles at 65 vertices each) that you can manipulate as a Page or as Tiles (i.e. you select a Page to be mostly flat using Libnoise or drop a Tile entirely in favor of a Mesh object.)
Future features:
- Floating Origin - I already have a functional system, I just need to integrate it - basically as you get too far away from the center, your vertices start jittering, this solves it by moving the camera and all the objects towards 0,0,0 and will account for this when building new Tiles.
- Completely wrap-around world - I already have a system in place, but I need to build the customization of the landscape in first as you do a Linear Interpolation on the edge Tiles/Pages with the reverse height of it's neighbor (hard to explain - will diagram later - it makes sense, though, I promise.)
- Customizable terrain creation through Libnoise's fractal synthesis including erosion algorithms and "paintable" editing where you'd actually store a heightmap that would filter in after the fractal is done.
- Run-time editing of the terrain
- And lastly something I haven't even tested, but I had thought about it:
Essentially when editing you'll have whatever bit-size to work with for heights (i.e. 0-65535 for 16 bit maps), but I think it would be possible to have a list of "extra" heightmaps you could build into that would get factored into the height of the vertex. For example: You start painting in manual height values onto your terrain and your mountain finally hits the roof of the bit value (65535 in my case), but you say "Ok, add another heightmap for this page" and it adds a fresh heightmap which you can continue adding more height values to and it builds it into the vertex, which is less limited to height value. There'd be limits to this, of course, but it shouldn't be hard to add in.
The other thing is texturing and that's easy to add to this implementation, so I'll get to that when I have time.
Once I get some of the more essential features (config files, more friendly interface, packaging, etc.) I'll release the source code. Shouldn't take me more than a few days to get a lot of that squared away.
If there's anything else you want added, post here and I'll try to tack it onto the list.
(I know it wasn't much of a Showcase, but there'll be more shots to come - I'm going to put Caelum, the Forest addon and nxOgre onto it probably tomorrow.)