Irrlicht Engine

This is a question for guidance. I am going to be using Digital Elevation Maps to create 16-bit Grayscale PNG file of a large landmass (IE: State/Nation). Then use that file to generate terrain in Irrlicht.

The problem I am having is that the files appear to be to large for Irrlicht to handle. I am currently using a 10mb file of Franklin County, New York. That file size would be small compared to a State/Nation size that would need to be able to be used in the program.

I was wondering if anyone knows a good way to handle a large height map for this situation. My current way of thinking is to create one low LOD height map and create bounding boxes at various sections of the map. When the camera crosses into those sections I will have Irrlicht generate a new height map and then render that to the screen. I am not sold that this method will be the best/fastest method for me to do this. If anyone has other ideas please let me know. I am very curious of a good solid method to go about this.

Thanks,
Jon Jones

check the projects forum, Arras has done a great tiled terrain scene node which may well do the trick for you, someone else has recently been working on a paging terrain node.

The tiled terrain managers found in the project/code snippet forums will help. Also the thread about planet rendering could do so.
Did you try to load the mesh as a terrain mesh instead of a terrain scene node? Together with VBOs this could also render huge terrains quickly.

Awesome! Thanks for the help!