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I have the option of doing either a mesh or a matrix for my terrain, and I need a professional opinion on which would be better for the long haul. The premise of the game I'm making involves floating islands way high up in the sky, so it presents a harder design challenge than terrain on ground level.

Currently, I'm shaping a matrix from a heightmap using DGDKs terrain commands. I used to load a .x mesh and use that instead; I switched because of load times, mainly, and for the extra "detail" texturing I can do with a matrix. However, due to the above premise of the game, it'll be hard to make the world look like it's an asymmetric floating island (since a generic matrix is square and can't have any overlap).

Basically, I'm looking for tips on how to make this work better. That would include:

1.)How to hide/cut out portions of a matrix I don't want after creating it (can I remove tiles that have a certain color key based off its texture?)

2.)How to append a matrix to another object (like a "base object") and fill in any gaps produced

3.) or tell me I'm better off modeling the entire island first...which would be depressing

Any help would be appreciated.

I don't know much about matrix terrains, but you could try making several portions of the map seperately, and have them seamlessly connect together to form the main island(s). The advantage with this is that you can make the program hide or lower the quality of far segments, speeding up your program.

use BlitzTerrain, i think it will save you from all the headaches, you can find the thread in the WIP section of the forum