Questions regarding levels, what is the best way?

[Jallen]

Hi
I've recently decided I would like to try and make an RPG, something similar to the gameplay of dragon age origins, and I have made lots of small things before in both 2d and 3d, I have quite a lot of experience.

The problem I face is how on earth to do my levels

The first place I looked was to irr scene files because they are easy, but they are fundamentally flawed in that they are
1. Massive,
2. Slow to load and,
3. If I were to have the player run around in them, I would have to set up a triangle selector for every single node...
4. I can't have terrain with painted textures in them.
Now that's obviously not ideal. As well as this it's got no way of editing terrain so that makes it inconvenient to work with.

I thought maybe I could use quake 3 maps but I'm not sure where to start on them...

Basically what I want is...
- To be able to import my textured static 3d models, position and rotate them
- To be able to edit terrain and paint textures onto it (I don't want just one texture on the whole of my terrain)

I thought of creating a texture for a terrain mesh, but the problem is that the texture would need to be huge to not look terrible.

Just to make it clear, I only need it to position and edit static stuff like buildings and terrain.
Thanks.

[Lonesome Ducky]

You'll find that many games use things like triangle selector to test for collision, but they usually use a simplified mesh for collision detection.

[Ulf]

Why don't you start doing it then before you ask everyone, "I have heaps of experience but EXACTLY how should I do it?
If you know what you want and have so much experience then should be no problem understanding the API.

[Jallen]

Why don't you start doing it then before you ask everyone, "I have heaps of experience but EXACTLY how should I do it?
If you know what you want and have so much experience then should be no problem understanding the API.

I have no problem understanding the API and I have no problem with the programming. I have made lots of smaller games with which irredit is sufficient for levels, but for this project I'm almost sure that they will get huge and take forever to load.

I was simply checking what the best way to do levels is, it has nothing to do with the programming.

[Tranen]

IMO you should use physic engine like bullet to perform collision (it has terrain support) and create a custom terrain node that supports paging and/or terrain splatting (maybe there are some around the forum but I don't know if they are in usable state or under devlopment)

You can use a quadtree to know whith tile of terrain load (and the objects over the terrain must also have a reference to the quad tree node so when you load the terrain you load them too)

Of course it is not a quick solution maybe someone has one better

Regards

[Jallen]

I think I'm just going to make my own editor, so far everything I have encountered is flawed in some way or another.

It will be a learning experience I guess.