I have a system to generate infinite terrain as objects move through new areas, but it doesn't feel like a world. It just feels like polygons. The world is intended to be used for a persistent-world online FPS.

Video showing generation and overview (first 30 seconds is flyover, generation starts after)

That is what I have so far. I have no idea what to do next. All I know is that it doesn't feel like anything, compared to other games like Skyrim that feel like something.

I know there are no trees in the video above -- I do have a system to generate trees as well, but there are many technical hurdles before it can be used in practice: video1:

video 2:

Any advice would be great.

You just need to add realism:

Sky, lighting, shadows, grass, better textures..

Also, your terrain looks a bit too noisy. Take a look at this for example (not mine). Take away the scattering, skybox, grass and fog and you're left with polygons too :)

You should also generate features that make each place feel special.

You already have good non-flattish terrain, but you also need areas with water, flat areas... (think biomes in minecraft)

And some actual non-terrain objects to make places special. Big rocks, waterfalls, fallen trees, caves, human constructions of all kinds...

Try to make your textures respond to the generated mesh data. If you have a very steep hill, it's likely most plants wouldn't grow on it/it would be rocky.

Project spark at E3 did it pretty well. Check out the stuff they do.

Another thing that may help you get over that 'polygon' feeling is to go and do a further level of detail that is very close to the camera. Break those near by polygons up even more so it feels like the user is walking over smooth curving surfaces, not series of flat planes joining at sharp angles.

Thanks for the replies.

Some more information on what my generation does so far:

I am currently using phong shading and normal mapping. There is LOD, but it looks terrible. I do have shadows, but I turned off terrain self-shadowing; the shadows work with other objects.

The textures are generated based on slope.

The terrain generation uses perlin noise, but there is no bias in locations (all locations currently use the same noise functions and frequency / amplitude combinations). I am brainstorming methods to have an additional noise function compute the type of terrain at each spot which then chooses which frequencies and amplitudes to use.

The textures are placeholders that were the first I found from searching google image search.

There are no trees or grass pieces in the first video; In my original post, I linked the separate video showing how I generate plants and trees.

It subdivides the world into a quad tree and tries to keep track of the virility of the land in each cell. It randomly seeds the terrain with a couple plants and trees to start with, then each frame simulates their growth and allows them to spread seeds. The plants compete for resources until the simulation converges locally.

This works fine for the grass and in my tests can support 100,000 individual grass pieces in a single cell being dynamically updated and spread each frame, as well as searching through them to render.

The grass is fine. The problem is the trees are also dynamically grown and their mesh is generated on the fly. I can't figure out how to solve the issue that each tree takes anywhere from a couple megabytes to 10's of megabytes per tree. It's not going to work at all because the memory just runs out. I'm not sure how to solve this.

Not to be that guy, but can you turn off the orbiting sun for your demo videos?

Yeah, I don't know why I did that. Sorry.