A lot of professionals use LOD terrains, these are generated on the fly, so only the parts that are visible are drawn, and the detail deminishes depending on the distance, like the farthest away point might be the same resolution as most DB matrices, but the closer to the camera the higher the resolution. With similar polycounts, pro's can get those nice smooth hills because they're using optimised terrain engines that make good use of detail, so all those polys that are wasted with DB, are used to increase detail on propper terrain engines. The terrain is probably a high res heightmap, the data would have to be consistant over the whole thing, so that fine detail closest to the camera has to be possible no matter where the camera is, the data would be skipped further away from the camera, so the terrain might only be made from every 8 points far away from the camera, but every single point would be used close to the camera.
BSP terrains are similar to our matrices, but higher res again because they have the benefit of detail occlusion to keep the speed up.
Of course multitexturing plays a big part in the look of pro terrains, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to do cool terrains in DBPro soon enough though.
Van-B
I laugh in the face of fate!
