Hey everyone! I''ve been doing a little research into those wonderful things called terrain engines, and thought that the wonderful people in NeHeLandTM would have valuable opinions on the subject... In terms of a data structure to store the terrain, has anyone found anything more efficient than a quadtree? I like the quadtree because you can easily rip out triangle fans for speed, but I am open to thoughts/suggestions. Are you interested in SETEC ASTRONOMY?

That is actually pretty much as fast as its going to get because quad trees are fast. There are fancier ways of doing it like graphs and or using an area of an array, accessing it by using a position matrix. This almost makes hidden surface removal for (out of possible range of view) not nessessary, but you can possibly find a way to incorporate this in to the method you are already using. If I am not explaining this very well, don''t worry. Your method is actually good enough in my opinion. Since graphics is what normally slows programs down the most, trying to prevent polygons from being going through rasterization and some other rendering steps is most crutial.