Hi,

I have build a simple terrain rendering based upon some tutorials i have found. The engine uses geomipmapping and slope-based texturing.

For collision detection, my approach is currently the following: I use a simplified mesh from the original terrain (actually, from the geomipmap). Then i use a quadtree to check for the node the player is in and do a ellipse to poly collision test on the simplified mesh. This works fine, but i am wondering whether this is a comon approach or are there some other, more recommended ways of doing collision detection on terrain?

Thanks for any suggestions/comments,

betastrahler

Have a look at any of Frank Luna's excellent books on 3D Game Programming with DirectX and he gives a linear algebra/calculus type of solution that simply needs the heightmap data and uses bilinear interpolation to find the exact y-height at an arbitrary (x,z) location.