   Terrain with extreme view distances
  Does anyone know where I can find some good info or papers on the techniques used to draw terrain with extreme view distances? I am thinking of games like Lord of the Rings Online and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I know how the distant trees and such are handled (with imposters), but I can't seem to find much information on drawing the terrain itself. Is it just an advanced LOD technique?   
  Yeah there are a lot of papers on this subject, i found a lot while searching for papers on texture splatting.Roam is one technique i can think of, plenty of .pdf's will be found if you search for this keyword in google, try quad trees too.http://www.cognigraph.com/ROAM_homepage/ this site has some example codeThere are other techniques tho and they all have their pros and cons so it's deffo worth researching.   ;  Someday, I would love games to look like this:;  That's coming, give us time!There are a number of ways to render terrain, and the method used for far distances depends on them. I dont know why poeple always mention ROAM, it an outdated method.The simple brute force method may actually work very well for smaller sized levels (though still with relatively far viewing distance.. just take a large terrain mesh and render it all the way to horizon with a very far clipping plane.Another method is chuncked LOD, and various similar systems like Geomipmapping.Some games use two distinct systems for near and far terrain, one uses high res patches up close and a large mesh for distant terrain.  A good thing to do in these cases is to use a seperate z-buffer for the distant rendering, to avoid terrible z-fighting.My own system currently uses a large patch with in-built LODs using a vertex texture, and a large mesh in the distance..the distant terrain is drawn first with a different z-buffer, and allowed to overlap the closer far-plane.   ;  For very large terrains, chunked LOD (aka quad tree) and geoclipmapping (as opposed to geomipmapping) are two good choices. Geomipmapping is a great algorithm but it is not scalable since the number of draw calls is O(n2). As Matt Aufderheide already wrote, ROAM is mostly obsolete.Another thing you could look into is baking the distant terrain into the skybox at specific locations and blending between skyboxes as you move around.   ;  Slightly OT.Dark and light claims ~30km view distance. While the detail of terrain is somewhat lacking, it's mostly due to diversity of models, not so much the engine itself. They used to have a downloadable offline client for demo purposes on their site.My experience WRT to DnL has been that such extreme distances don't lend themselves to good gameplay. First problem is the height vs. screen size ratio. Entire terrain, if modeled realistically, is squeezed into some 10-20% horizontal band. Above is blue sky, below is ground, with only surrounding 50m that interest you.Comparing to other games, exaggerated height produces much more pleasing results.The Project Offset image is a nice example of non-realistic proportion. The mountains and the castle would be absurdly high if rendered in proportion, or, the camera would need to be highly zoomed in - neither of which is suitable for gameplay. Something that helps the image is also horizontal clipping - whereas real in-game view is usually in 3:4 ratio.So before going too crazy on distance itself, take also in consideration of presentation - 1km or less might be more than enough to achieve the effect you want.   ;  When I started doing research on geometric clipmaps, one of the first things I found was that Microsoft has it patented. To that end, I doubt I will use that technique. I am going to start playing with chunked LOD (found some good papers and examples), so thanks for that suggestion. I will let you guys know if I get anything working.   ;  The greatest collection on LOD techniques and papers can be found here: http://www.vterrain.org/LOD/Of course your implementation should match the goals you want to accomplish with it. If you want some good-looking mountains in the distance, but be unable to ever travel to them, you can use some simple trickery.If you really want a true "world" you need some advanced techniques and ROAM  is just one of them. It's true it isn't often used in games, because of its complicated implementation and the fact that it gives you more than most games need.[advertisement mode] Check out '''ovPlanet''' for an engine that is capable of doing true planetary terrain. [advertisement mode off]   