What is your way of rendering terrains?

Question

I wanna know how you render terrains in directx.
I have heard people saying that they are using RAW files and some said that they are using .x files. What is our way and why is it good?

Answer 1

Many 3D engines use height maps to render terrain, due to their space efficiency (only one raster image is required).

Answer 2

Well MY way of doing it is to compress a HUGE texture (128Kx128K) with my wavelet compression system to get ~150:1 compression. I then chunk load the texture from disk. ie the world is split up into multiple 256x256 chunks (Actually its kind of mipmapped with distance from the camera). I use the camera position to forward load a number of chunks around the camera position.

I then calculate the chunks that are visible and draw them. For this purpose I use the height data directly as a stream fed into my vertex shader. I then have a mesh where vertex positions correspond to the height positions in the height stream. I can then simply pull the y out of the heightmap stream and place it in the y position in my shader.

Its a pretty complex way of rendering terrain but you did ask how "you" do it ;)

PS the bonus of 128,000x128,000 is that I get 128km of terrain at meter accuracy :D