The current stuff I am working on has a 660 Foot vertex res, AH currently has 2480 res. I doubt will will go denser then this.
The new system has 16 + 4 base texture types the 16 are base types like rock grass snow ext.... the 4 types are higher res and are things like fields small towns excreta.
There is also a color per vertex that is blended with the terrain textures, along with a detail mask type like rows, rock excreta that is blended in as you get closer to the terrain.
The terrain does cast shadows. I devolved a new system for doing this that is extremely fast. Ill try post a screen or film later today.
There will be a converter for existing terrains , but some clean up would add a lot to the terrains.
Water will be change to have full 3d wave effects.
We are dropping support for fixed pipeline, and will require shader version 3.0 minimum. On last count before we started this, I saw less the 20 accounts that have played in the last year that did not support 3.0 shaders.
Clouds will have a small rework that will improve frame rate because we can depend on shader style implementation.
The terrain editor will remain basically the same for implanting objects. But for the look of the terrain features,textures and tree type features, it will make much more use of image editing tools.
I very much doubt trees will be destructible. Simple math of approximate 3000 objects per square mile and 512 x 512 miles creates over 1 gig of objects. This creates many issues with both memory and speed on displaying the status on all front ends.
HiTech
