Atlas problems and questions

I have some questions; perhaps someone has some anwers. :)

Everything is based on a 4097x4097 raw height map with a 2048x2048 texture.

Code used to build everything.

function runChunking()
{
    EnableWinConsole(true);// send logging output to a windows console window
    Echo("Starting chunker");

    generateChunkFileFromRaw16(
        "assets/semic/semic_16b_1c_4097.raw",
        4096, 20, 1.0 / 20,
        "assets/semic/semic.chu", 3.9, 6);
    Echo("Done chunking");
    
    generateTQT("assets/semic/semic_2048.jpg", "assets/semic/semic.tqt", 6, 64);
    Echo("Done");
    EnableWinConsole(false);
    Quit();
}

Output:

=== Chunk Statistics ===\
\===== Level    Count    Avg. Size
            0        1024      3345.493164
            1         256      13048.699219
            2          64      25561.406250
            3          16      38383.875000
            4           4      77857.000000
            5           1      186075.000000
========================================
                chunks:       1365
           input verts:   16777216
          output verts:    1042382
%
       avg verts/chunk:        764
NOTE: verts/chunk is low; for higher poly throughput consider setting the tree depth to 5 and reprocessing.
          output bytes:      50533
      bytes/input vert:       0.00
     bytes/output vert:       0.05
        real triangles:    9513827
Done chunking
Allocating ~384 kb of JPEG decompression working area...
Generating 32x32 leaf tiles...
  Done!
Done

This produces an 89mb chuck file. I've been playing around a lot with scale factor, error metric and tree depth. I've had chunk files anywhere from 30mb to 1.3gig off this same data set. One thing I noticed is that Torgue loads the chuck file into the page file when the game starts which seems like a really odd thing to be doing. I wonder if it is because of my view distance being set to 100,000... at any rate the game was using 1.3gig of ram at one point, however it ran smooth after it finally loaded it.

1st questions: I went from 16m input verts to 1m output verts; why?. I was under they impression that the lowest level in the tree would have the same number of verts as the input raw file.

This is a shot of the terrain in game: I've bumped the view and fog distances to 100,000.. It runs smooth on my system but there are some strange things going on.

For some reason textures are missing. Perhaps my view distance is insane, the game seems to handle it fine, in fact as far as I can tell it is rendering the geomtry in the black areas (hence the horizon line). The part that really doesn't make sense is why the lone texure out in the distance is loaded and not the one to my right which is far closer.

I've noticed that sometimes I'll move right over a tile and it will be black, if i swing the camera away from the tile (as in looking away from the tile) the texture pops in.


I get about 40 of these:

AtlasActivationHeightfield::generateNodeData - Max exceeded! May have paging issues!
AtlasActivationHeightfield::generateNodeData - Min exceeded! May have paging issues!
AtlasActivationHeightfield::generateNodeData - Min exceeded! May have paging issues!
AtlasActivationHeightfield::generateNodeData - Max exceeded! May have paging issues!

This has something to do with the a chuck's z bound.. What exatly does this mean? what are the paging issues I should be looking for? Solutions to fix the problem? Will this cause my texture problems?

Thanks!
-paul