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Criterium: Terrain

Terrain is, of course, one of the most important aspects of any video game.  It is the player's sandbox, and it fills most of the player's field of view.  Therefore special attention should be given to terrain.

In Criterium, the terrain will model an outdoor environment.  I considered city environments, but decided that the detailed textures and models needed for city streets would be too much work for one person.  Therefore, Criterium's environment will be a natural one: plains, mountains, hills, etc.

The obvious answer for this type of environment is a terrain heightmap.  Heightmaps are relatively easy to use in Ogre thanks to the terrain and paging scene managers.  Heightmaps can be generated with a tool like Terragen or even GIMP (the cloud effect makes a good base for a random heightmap).

The terrain also has to include vegetation and roads.  I figure I might have to make some kind of tool for placing vegetation, or perhaps I could load trees by using a texture as a density distribution.  Tree models could be supplied by ngPlant.
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