   Creating terrain for first person shooter
  Hey, I'm in the progress of programming a first person shooter in C++, and for a while I've just been using a simple piece of flat land with tree's here and there.But now, I need something better. I'll be making outdoor scenes filled with tree's.First, I was wondering which would be a better way to do this. Either A) In 3ds Max or similar program, model the scene, texture it, shadow it, and apply objects, such as tree's. Or B) Render a heightmap, lightmap, and texturemap, and have another similar image of the same dimension with colored dots. And if its X color, display X object, eg. if it's a white dot, place a tree at that spot.Second, if it's to get a heightmap and all that, what program would you recomend using?   
  I think what you're trying to decide is what format export it to, and what to load it in.  If you already have something that'll load models from max, it may be easier to just place everything in there.  This works fine, assuming your trees are destructable or anything along those lines.I attempted the heightmap approach once.  I can't find the same program I used right now.  A few people I know have used this: http://hme.sourceforge.net/ and have liked it.   ;  Would it be reasonable and decent looking, to render the terrain with a heightmap and lightmap, and then, have a common texture throughout all of it, covered by a colormap? Or do most indies, beginners, hobbyist, use multiple textures?   ;  My site just-code-it.net has some tutorials on terrain. The tutorials are in DirectX 9, and C#. However, still take a look at them as you can get a general idea of the process / algorithm, and C# syntax is very similar to C++ (without DX). Hope they helpJames   