Maybe I have found I solution for the terrain done with tiles. It's far from being perfect but it's a first try:
I could generate the texture for my terrain at the begining of the level, by generating a texture. This texture will be filled with the small tiles ordered in a certain manner.
The advantages of this technique are: not a lot of 'low-level' modifications in the engine, I 'just' have to override the TerrainSceneNode to add some specific functions (for generating the texture). The rest will be handled by the CTerrainSceneNode. Another advantage is that I will be able to do some 'pre-processing' on the terrain that is have some specific processing on the tiles transitions (I can use several methods, maybe I will implement several of them). It will also be as fast as a normal terrain rendering because once the texture has been generated (could take a little bit of time but it is just once), it is a normal terrain rendering processing.
But (and there is a but, unfortunately
), there are some (and one major) disadventages. The biggest disadventage will be the memory used to store this texture: it could be quite big, depending on the terrain size (for example, a terrain of 100X100 tiles of 64X64 pixels, calculate, that makes a huuuuge amount of memory). And 100 X 100 is not that excessive. Another disadventage (more from a coding point of vue): the ITexture and IImage classes of the engine doesn't provide a lot of support for this kind of operation so the processing will require pixel by pixel copying (from small texture to the big texture) but this could be done without too much problems.
So, what do you think of this approach ? I know, because of the texture size it won't be probably feasible unfortunately. OR maybe do you have another suggestion for that part ?
Thanks for all the help, if I manage to find a solution to that, I will surely give it back to the community
