This is my own engine. Also its just the terrain im talking about, tree and houses will be added seperately, since there are many of the same house and MANY of the same trees, i will only load them once, then just go through a list and draw them where they need to be.

What about making 5-10 premade road sections, and then just make like a train set of them around the world. I dont'' know how my collsion system would handle those overlaps and gaps, that why idealy id like it as 1 huge mesh. The roads and terrain can be differnt groups but their vertecies idealy should perfectly line up. How do games like Midtown Madness do it?

What is a good number of vertecies for a height map. My land is 1 mile square. So i was thinkin if i have 1 vertex every foot thats 27878400 vertecies. And thats where my problem is. I could model a yard in like 20 verticies, but the curbs will need more.

Assuming you''re not rendering the entire scene at once (You want it to be multiplayer right?) then your total scene polycount is irrelevent (For the most part), assuming your engine can handle whatever parts of the scene it does render, you should be fine.

Why don''t you just test your heightmap using your engine? And then make adjustments as you see fit, rather than adjusting your heightmap to a specification I or someone else throws at you.

Because im still writing the engine, and if i need to implement some combination for methods for the terrain i would like to know that before i code some heightmap that looks bad, or try to load a mesh that i can''t make.

It seems to me that, unless the terrain in your neighborhood and later courses that you might add is going to be very hilly and very large, there is no need to use a heightmap during the game because it seems like using a heightmap is best suited to when you are going to be doing some sort of dynamic LOD.
What might work is creating static geometry before running the game using two bitmaps, one a heightmap for your neighborhood and another a roadmap and you would initally create the heightmap at high detail then level the vertices where the road is. You could then optimize the mesh to get rid of a large number of vertices and just save it as a .x file or in whatever form you want. You'd also probably want to divide this mesh up into patches so that you aren't applying the road surface texture(s) to large areas where it doesn't appear. Alternatively, you could divide up your mesh into a road mesh and a terrain mesh, but I'm not sure how you would glue them together so that no little holes appeared.
Well, anyway, my point is that I don't see why you would want to use a heightmap at runtime as opposed to just using a premade mesh.
-Eric

[edited by - gurgi on June 5, 2003 2:32:38 AM]