Hi blink0k
thanks for the (fast) reply, I have read up a fair amount and thought those two may be the only options but don't think they are viable as they appear to be no different than DBP's memblock mesh's, the CreateObjectFromHeightMap() is basically a sped up variant to cut out all that "fathing" around as best I can tell
So far as far as shaders go, ogl appears to be very similar to direct x, now once upon a time I found that some dx shaders could have meshes switched out in DBP without reapplying the lost shader, but when I revisited it years later I could not recreate this method. it could be related to newer updates for DBP at the time, idk, I just haven't been able to reproduce it ever since.
The key to the vertexdata command set was that only when you unlocked the vertex data did the entirety of the ram held data get action-ed, ie sent to the gfx card and the peek poke commands would be used to alter the area of ram that DBP used behind the scenes prior to this, could literally choose how much work you wanted to do and when. Only when unlocking the vertexdata(ie sending to gfx card) was the performance hit the most. The maxdrawprimitives was useful for other objects rather than terrain sections as you could choose to clip however many triangles off the end of a 5k poly object thusly allowing you to reuse it for any object <5k which is useful to say the least when it comes to managing a scene. Ultimately 5k objects was my starting limit as I could easily manipulate an object of this size EVERY frame while still achieving 60fps even on some older hardware(even a LOT older than the machine I currently limp along with detailed in my sig)
Not to worry, if nobody can further the cause so to speak I will pipe up on wickedX's thread and see what his take on it is. I will revisit tomorrow anyway as its getting late here. Cheers
Win 7 Pro 64 bit SP1, AMD A4-5300 APU 3.4GHz, 8GB DDR3, NVidia GeForce GTX 750 1GB GDDR5, ASUS A55BM-E