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Hey! So, I have a terrain - with the camera looking down at it (not birds eye, it has a slight angle), and the user has the ability to move the camera around the scene, okay? Right now - you can see the borders of the terrain ... very ugly! Is there any suggestions you guys might want to throw in to hide, or give the feeling that the land goes on for ever? I was thinking about just blacking out the 'unimportant' land - like what Command & Conquer do when you haven't visited a particular place. How would I go about doing that? Unless you have any other idea? Cheers all!
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I've struggled with this in the past, and what it really boils down to is good level design. However, if your game is top-downish like you mentioned, then this is waaay easier an issue for you to solve than if it was an over-the-shoulder 3rd person game. What I would do in your situation is use as many natural borders as you could near the outside of your terrain (mountains, rocks, trees, shorelines), but most importantly: make the playable area smaller than the size of the terrain. That way, people should never truly be able to see the edges of the map (ew!). If your camera wasn't top down, then you REALLY need to get clever, and be a good designer. Look at games like Oblivion, World of Warcraft, Just Cause 2, Mercenaries 2, Fallout 3, etc. games that have large, open worlds that handle world boundaries gracefully. It generally boils down to natural boundaries (impassible mountains, forests, shorelines), or always making your world an island. Here's an example of a nicely designed terrain in Unity that handles boundaries gracefully, made by an artist and friend of mine: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v242/aquavamp/terrainWIP1-2.jpg
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Stitchscape doesn't really solve his issue, because the player would still eventually reach the border of a terrain. At some point, you have to decide how you'll handle boundaries and terrain edges gracefully.
Jan 25 '11 at 09:13 PM
PrimeDerektive
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Might I suggest what Unity Technologies did for the Boot camp demo. It has a huge terrain broken up into smaller low poly models. The play field is a terrain that is lifted a little above the smaller low poly models used as the scenery meshes. Then place some simple box colliders around the play area. Most games follow a similar technique, Like: Assassin's Creed, Ghost Recon series, Call of Duty series etc. Look at the Boot camp demo.
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