Finally finished with "base" terrain...for now

Most of the work I did this week was to make terrain features to populate the demo map. I made 27 different hills, each under 200 feet in height.

Screens

Each type of hill is repeated 10 times over an area of 23km/sq for a total of 270 hills. I still need to code the caching routines for loading only hills and objects within view of the camera to keep the poly count down. Im also not sure of what I should do at the "edges" of the map where the terrain features stop. I could just do nothing and let the players continue going on a flat plain, or I could make large mountain ranges that surround the map. One thing I dont care to do is repeat the map over and over or restrict player movement to only within the play area. Ignore the tank and dead trees in the shot, they were there to test sizing and my attempt at making a dead tree model. The problem Im going to run into with having mountains surround the map is that its a little unrealistic for one, and I'll have to figure out a way to make decent looking large mountains quickly. Currently I just use the terrain generator function in MS3D and tweak the settings to make ok looking hills. Ive tried to make mountains but the terrain generator only supports 64x64 maps with a max height of 200. It works fine, but the mountains look horrible when scaled vertically in order to make them steep enough to not allow traversal by players.

Ive also started coding the world generator program so I can just define variables about a map and have it automatically generated using data contained in files about each terrain/vegetation/scrounge/etc object. In tests just generating tree positions, the map file was about 5.5MB uncompressed and contained the species, type, name, and position of 437,500 trees. Seems rather large to me in order to define trees, but I dont know if thats a normal size for such a thing.