Is the Blender Game Engine powerful enough to support large landscape areas?
If not what should I do in order to make a rather large background (like in regular FPS games)?
And how am I supposed to map the landscape to make it look good?
Thanks.
The blender game engine is really powerful. You can make large open world but it might get quite complicated though. But it is possible. Sure.
If you want to wait a bit (a bit= from 1 to 2 weeks) i’ll post a script with all the explaination on how to use it for using HUGE landscapes into the bge with minimum framerate drop.
Right now i’m working on it(you can see in the python/script section a part of the work)
If you prefer high framerate over realism, go with a skybox (a cube with sky and landscape textures on the sides).
For the texturing at least you would use GLSL shading and a node tree to blend materials together using multiple vertex color channels, I don’t think there’s a real easy way to do it in Multitexture or TexFace mode though if your machine doesn’t support the former.
For the modeling you would usually start with a large plane and subdivide it, you can then save on polygon count by eliminating pieces of edgeloops in flat areas that won’t affect the vertex color stenciling or detail in a real visible way and not modeling areas that are both inaccessible and won’t be seen.
To speed up large terrains you would need to take advantage of frustum and occlusion culling by cutting your terrain into multiple objects, the best way to do this without introducing a line of solid shading is to create an extra edgeloop between two existing ones and divide the object on the new loop.