Any (not so obvious) downsides to using a terrain mesh?

[unixfan]

I was aware of the LOD bit.

However. Can’t this be slightly alleviated by reorganizing the mesh back into an octree, using EggOctree?

Egg Octree

Egg Octree This code allows to split an Egg object and build an octree. What is an Octree ? (from Wikipedia) An octree is a tree data structure in which each internal node has up to eight children. Octrees are most often used to partition a three dimensional space by recursively subdividing it into eight octants. How does this implementation work ? Give it an egg object, with a vertexpool and a list of vertices. You also give a minimum cell size. A new egg object is created, with a tree con…

My main beef with simple, height map based terrains is that one can’t possibly hope to design all of the terrain in it. In our engine, I can first create a terrain from a height map (or any random noise) and then, if I find a spot I’d like to have a cave at, "punch in a few holes.