ZDoom

Hmmm, you know, maybe I am looking at this wrong. I'm realizing that this engine have some quirks which makes certain geometry work far better than in a typical 3D engine. A good example is stuff like how you can just have a pit that goes straight down a few inches, and that's basically where your grass becomes a mud hole. Maybe I should actually try more of that. That said, I suppose there is no truly perfect way to do this, but I will keep looking into it, probably use a combination of all these methods, and we'll see what I come up with. I also suppose that I did say I wanted really different geometry from other games, so maybe this is how I'm going to do it.

The only other real option is to have a set of generic transition zone flats and plan those areas out. Like:

[list][*]Horizontal east-west snow-to-grass transition
[*]Vertical north-south grass-to-dirt transition
[*]Vertical north-south dirt-to-grass transition
[*]Diagonal NW-SE snow-to-grass transiton
[*]Diagonal SE into vertical north grass-to-snow transition[/list]
Etc. It's a lot of work but probably the only way to make truly generic transitions without "megatexturing."

That said, I'm pretty sure there's been a few people some megatexture-like work with GZDoom and it's not as horrible as it seems. At worst just chunk your "megatextures" into reasonable sections like 1024x1024 and then you only have to worry about the transitions between those.

8-)

I've seen both of them. They're pretty basic. I don't want to use the technique where you draw the terrain as a megatexture because there's a huge map and I'm worried that it'll blow the system requirements up or something...

Terrain Generator is handy for that. Besides being an easy to use height map editor, it also let's you paint textures for easy blending. Could save you a ton of work.

Also, you might want to watch this:

[youtube]nOhjP0Hj3eE[/youtube]

EDIT: just realized I linked the wrong video, but they both are good to learn from:
[youtube]hzCeD3FjTRs[/youtube]

Good suggestions. I've never used the .obj terrain feature before... Things was something I've already implemented, so good call there too...

I wonder if I could do something with flat sprites or decals to cover up the lines between grass and mud...

You could use Things to smooth the transition; for example, having bushes bleed over slightly from a grassy area to a sandy one.

Could use a prefab .obj made in terrain generator or blender even with your own texturing.

I want to push the boundaries of this a little, see if I can get something that looks kind of realistic going. Right now I'm using patched textures a transition between terrain types. Still not clear on the how well I can make this work...

Create transition textures or keep it simple and go for Doom's original style, which just had hard sector borders between terrain types. You can always make sector lines more wavy and uneven, or even create alternate patches like a dithering effect.

So I've been working on some large outdoor areas with custom-made terrain textures, and I'm trying to figure out what the best way to do transitions between them will be. So far it looks like I'm doing a mix of grass, dirt, mud, and rock. I've seen people use a method involving drawing the transitions themselves, but I don't know if that will work well for what I'm doing.

Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on this?