Thanks i3di, that sounds very interesting. However I think my requirements are little different to most. Most games that require large terrains only show a relatively small amount of the terrain at once, so they can load in the current and neighbouring terrain chunks and that's all fine, but in my case I need the ability to zoom completely out so that I can see the entire terrain at once.

Does your World Max assume that you will only be viewing a small piece of your terrain at once, or can it use LOD to show more of the terrain (At lower levels of detail) as you zoom out?

Thanks
Ben

13 hours ago, BenS1 said:

but in my case I need the ability to zoom completely out so that I can see the entire terrain at once.

Some games use a map for this. So as you start to zoom out LODs will replace the models and once your reach the point where there is no LODs you lerp a image of a map over the scene.

The map will then have little indicators of where things are.

Unreal does LOD it's terrain like this but there are limits to what can be done and the terrain looses detail quickly.

Thanks again @Scouting Ninja

Yeah I was thinking about having a "Strategic Map" so that you can zoom out so far using the real terrain and then blend out to an overall map. The trick is trying to get this blend to work smoothly and seemlessly.

Supreme Commanders strategic zoom looks great, whereas the strategic zoom in Ashes of the Singularity Escalation looks ok-ish but definitely not as good.

Just found this thread. I basically just asked the same question (https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/696735-is-there-any-game-engine-that-supports-a-large-world-model/). My code is a bit different. I do the calculation on the CPU an I'm targeting an MMO environment, however probably a lot of the problems are similar. Did you ever find any engine that works for you?