   3D tiles
  Any one know how the tiles are done in 3D RTS's like Warcraft 3?  Are there 100's of meshes with textures, or is it a single mesh and they render a different texture on the top of it to make the different tiles?Thanks,Geo   
  Mixed, probably different textures on top of the heightmap for the most part, at least in an older game like Warcraft 3. Things not in the heightmap, such as cliffs etc, are their own meshes, even though those too might be repeated with different textures.   ;  first thing to do, is decouple the  gameplay  from the  rendering  completely.just because your game-space is tiled, doesn't mean you have to treat the rendering, strictly, as  tiles . its an important concept to have.  :). from memory, it looked to me like the rendering for warcraft 3 (and similar RTS games) consisted of a single terrain layer, with objects placed on top of the layer for dressing.  the position of these objects was likely derived from a "tile" representation, but the actual mesh is unlikely to be broken into tiles (mostly for simplicity and performance sake).Im also going to guess that they use multitexturing in order to mix the "look" of the landscape.  That they used some kind of PVS or other to space partition the terrain layer into chunks to minimize rendering load. (and no doubt, a similar technique for static mesh objects placed on the terrain), and that the concept of  tiles  is purely a  gameplay  device. again, split the renderable representation from the gameplay logic, its all smoke and mirrors :)