"If you want a big terrain a matrix is actually an excellent way of going about doing it but you dont make it big, you make it small - and then have it follow the camera."
I don't agree.
Consider a 64x64 mesh. If you scale that to be a mere 64 meters wide, that's a detail level of one tile per meter. You don't really want to go much lower than that.
64 meters with you at the center means a maximum viewing distance of just 32 meters. A meter is approximately equal to a yard, and a yard has three feet. Telephone poles are spaced 100 feet apart. So 32 meters is approximately the distance between two telephone poles. I think you will agree that is not a very good view distance.
Even if you reduce the level of detail to one tile for every two meters, you're still going to be seriously limited in your view distance. You might be okay if your game is set in the woods, but if you want open plains you'll have to do better than that.
But that's besides the point, because even at a resolution of a mere 64x64 tiles, you cannot update the mesh in realtime. You'll kill the framerate. This is a big problem when people want to render water, because water requires vertex animation. So you're probably going to be realistically limited to a 16x16 terrain or at most 32x32 if you are willing to take the framerate hit. That's simply nowhere near the detail of modern 3D games.
My own terrain system uses "tiles" where each tile is a 16x16 mesh itself, and it has like 32x32 of these tiles in a grid. That's way way more detail than what you're talking about and it's still just barely acceptable.
I'm not trying to bash your terrain system or anything to sell my own. Nobody buys mine. :-) I'm just telling you my own exerience from using the DB terrains so long ago and from programming my own.
Yes, with a scrolling terrain you can have extremely large terrains, but if you can't see more than a couple hundred feet in front of you, it's a lot less useful than it sounds. If you wanted to make a whole game set in the woods, I guess it would be of some use, but if I'm playing a gme set in the woods, sometimes you want to get out of them onto the vast open plains and see hills in the distance. :-)
Oh and another drawback is that you can't go very high above the terrain because the terrain doesn't exist far from the camera.
I don't agree.
Consider a 64x64 mesh. If you scale that to be a mere 64 meters wide, that's a detail level of one tile per meter. You don't really want to go much lower than that.
64 meters with you at the center means a maximum viewing distance of just 32 meters. A meter is approximately equal to a yard, and a yard has three feet. Telephone poles are spaced 100 feet apart. So 32 meters is approximately the distance between two telephone poles. I think you will agree that is not a very good view distance.
Even if you reduce the level of detail to one tile for every two meters, you're still going to be seriously limited in your view distance. You might be okay if your game is set in the woods, but if you want open plains you'll have to do better than that.
But that's besides the point, because even at a resolution of a mere 64x64 tiles, you cannot update the mesh in realtime. You'll kill the framerate. This is a big problem when people want to render water, because water requires vertex animation. So you're probably going to be realistically limited to a 16x16 terrain or at most 32x32 if you are willing to take the framerate hit. That's simply nowhere near the detail of modern 3D games.
My own terrain system uses "tiles" where each tile is a 16x16 mesh itself, and it has like 32x32 of these tiles in a grid. That's way way more detail than what you're talking about and it's still just barely acceptable.
I'm not trying to bash your terrain system or anything to sell my own. Nobody buys mine. :-) I'm just telling you my own exerience from using the DB terrains so long ago and from programming my own.
Yes, with a scrolling terrain you can have extremely large terrains, but if you can't see more than a couple hundred feet in front of you, it's a lot less useful than it sounds. If you wanted to make a whole game set in the woods, I guess it would be of some use, but if I'm playing a gme set in the woods, sometimes you want to get out of them onto the vast open plains and see hills in the distance. :-)
Oh and another drawback is that you can't go very high above the terrain because the terrain doesn't exist far from the camera.