Max. World Size?

#1 Ken,

I think the gist of your question is, "How large can a single map be?" If you don't already know, the Torque engine tiles a 256x256 heightmap 'inifinitly'. i.e. You can have one unique map or if you choose to place objects outside of the center heightmap, you can have an infinite area of repeating terrain. As far as measurements go, by default the terrain measures 2km by 2km.

The default setting is 8m per square (defined by points in the bitmap).

However, after all that, there are people who have investigated making larger non-repeating maps:

Try the Links section of my page under Terrain:

Torque Notes

-ed

#2 Without the Terrian your not Bound by any limits other than how many peices you want to build and stick together.

#3 You can also use the terrain manager to do rather larger terrains.

You might run into some issues if you try to do... uh... really large levels. But 18km (or even 100km) will be just fine.

#4 Would creating the terrain as a VERY HIGH RESOLUTION image, and then breaking it up into 256x256 be a good method for the creation of larger worlds?

#5 @Tim - Yep it sure would be. Here's the zone system GORPE will be using:

First start with a large heightmap and perform all of the fractal land generation on it.

Next divide that into 256x256 invidual heightmaps. That gives us something that looks like the following:
01 02 03 04 05 06
07 08 09 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30

With each number representing a 256x256 heightmap.

Each zone consists of our "primary" terrain block(s) plus it's surround blocks. I've not decided on how big the primary block will be but I'm leaning towards 4x4 but for examples sake I'll use 1x1 as it's easier.

Using the above terrain-block map as a guide we would build a zone (mission) for block 8 by including block 8 and it's surrounding blocks. So it looks something like:

01 02 03
07 08 09
13 14 15

With the player resrticted to the terrain block in the middle. Trying to leave the "primary" block results in a zone change. HOWEVER within the editor the additional terrain blocks are editable. This allows for perfect stiching of the terrain blocks.

All of the above assumes you're using a zone system, which GORPE instead of a terrain paging system like AC or DAOC for example. There are advantages to each approach, I prefer the zone based system by far as the paging systems place too many restrictions on you.