I've noticed the warcraft3 maps have a lot of fringe elements.
Its an old technique in 2d games where everything was made out of tiles. You have say.. urm.. a pile of hay. The pile of hay fills on tile but overlaps other tiles. So for one
haystack tile, you actually draw a 3*3 tile.
however, they did this on their own wacked out hi-res heightfield doohicky which I really think is quite cool.
You could make one big bitmap and then cut it up into sections and paste each section to a heightfield/mesh type system.
So, if each heightfield had a 128*128 texture and there were 64 sections set into an 8*8 grid, then I think you'd be getting pretty close to what warcraft looks like.
That'd probably be the easiest way. Maybe not the best way.
If you used a bunch of different heightfields, you'll notice
the seams where they meet because the normals wouldnt be the
same. But if you made them meshes, you could smooth the seams out.
I really have no idea if this would work that well since I've never tried it. But it seems quite feasible.
Its an old technique in 2d games where everything was made out of tiles. You have say.. urm.. a pile of hay. The pile of hay fills on tile but overlaps other tiles. So for one
haystack tile, you actually draw a 3*3 tile.
however, they did this on their own wacked out hi-res heightfield doohicky which I really think is quite cool.
You could make one big bitmap and then cut it up into sections and paste each section to a heightfield/mesh type system.
So, if each heightfield had a 128*128 texture and there were 64 sections set into an 8*8 grid, then I think you'd be getting pretty close to what warcraft looks like.
That'd probably be the easiest way. Maybe not the best way.
If you used a bunch of different heightfields, you'll notice
the seams where they meet because the normals wouldnt be the
same. But if you made them meshes, you could smooth the seams out.
I really have no idea if this would work that well since I've never tried it. But it seems quite feasible.