Hey guys, it's been a while since I've been to this board. Seems like forever.
One of my goals is to find a fairly easy strategy to make game worlds by using Blender and DBPro together. My only trouble is that I'm not all that sure where to start! I can create the structure of the said level pretty well, but I'm wondering if the whole static level should be completely interconnected by vertices, or if I can let it slide and mix and match separate static components.
My other concern is finding an efficient way to manage textures. Say that you have a terrain that uses two textures, a grass texture and dirt texture, and you want to create a path. Well, that path may very well be a long one!
And who wants to create a 4096x4096 texture for that, eh? There's gotta be a more efficient way to manage this, especially since games like Rareware's N64 titles make it look so easy (and you know how much RAM an N64 has). Could I use a dirt 256p texture and grass 256p texture along with some sort of file to map these together onto, say, a matrix/plane efficiently? This basically goes along with my concern of generally blending textures onto an object without getting those 4096p files.
You could think of Age of Mythology's map editor as a good example of this. It uses fairly small textures and allows the user to use a brush to "paint" the textures right on the terrain!
My intention is not to present one of those noobish "HOWZ DO ai creAtez level?" threads or "book? i hate book! book is stupid!" thread, and I apologize if that's what this looks like, I just need some guidance as to how exactly to go about doing this. I know that it's possible to make some sort of game engine with it's own resource manager and metadata files to convert and present the models at blindingly fast speeds (which is actually one inspiration I have as an indie developer), but I really want to give DBPro a chance and use it as some sort of new hobby.
Here's some pictures to show what I mean:
