Rendering terrain with a lot of different textures

[Mr. Turner]

Hi,

I'm trying to create a basic game engine that draws a 3d map with many different textures like rocks, grass, grass-dirt, sand, deep water, shallow water,...
You can best compare it with an RTS game like Warcraft 3, Starcraft,...

Units, buildings, trees,... are added through a .scene afterwards.

Is this possible with landscape manager + texture splatting? Is this advisable? Any other ideas?

What do you think is the best way to render such scenes?

Mr. Turner

[eugen]

just my opinion...

i think blizzard's games are tile based...for every 3dcube (of certain dimension) on the map they have a description that would tell them what kind of type is it (dirt, grass, ...) and also the height and the type of height they use...
(they are not using a real physical engine...)
it would be a good aproach if can use the landscape plugin or similar choice but in a restrictive way (letting the user change the map only to fixed heights, applying the texture yourself, regardin the type of cube he's applying) and memorize every tile in a structure...this would be easy to use in an editor and in the game too, since u'll need to know on what type of ground are u (for specific actions, ex:creep), and also the height or other information...
they use this tiled aproach to implement pathfinding too, i think...
as for rendering, as much as u can, group the static geometry in one mesh, the non static separate...

[Mr. Turner]

So basically you mean this:
Pre:
* create the whole map as a big mesh using some editor

Engine:
* open the mesh and parse & store all tiles
* use the info of a home-made fileformat to apply textures to each tile
* use a .scene format to implent all dynamic game-specific data

This is exactly what I need. Any examples or docs on that tile parsing & tilebased texture applying?

[eugen]

pls use search...i know there are some threads on this 'tile' subject...but i dont remember which one...
often, people design their own tile editor...as a game editor!
since u have other informations to add (buildings,...) u'll need one that will fit your game needs!