Is terrain rendering occluded by water and is tiling supported in A3?

Is terrain rendering occluded by water? I'm considering sacrificing detail in my new terrain and orthophotos in favor of better performance.

I'm making a map that is mostly sea with a dozen or so tiny islands. Players will use the land too but I really want good performance in sea battles. The overall terrain measures 16384 m square.

I have LIDAR data so if there's a way to only use hi-res data in the islands and low-res in the seafloor I can make islands up to 1m/px resolution, with image overlays as detailed as 0.15m/px. In reality the final map will likely use something ranging between 4 and 10m per pixel for the elevations and 1 or 2m/px for the images. What do you guys think? In the VBS2 Developer Reference I've been reading about using multiple maps though I don't know if I can do that in Visitor, haven't tested yet. I can't really work with images over 8192 px square, so unless I can tile I wont' be able to use overlays larger than that, leaving my terrain with at best 2m/px.

Judging by the number of page views there's at least some passing interest in this topic, so I'll update with some news. I still don't know about the terrain itself, whether it will support a lower res background terrain and LIDAR-quality detail in the islands, but it seems that I can use multiple sat images in this way, one low-res to cover the seafloor, and then others at higher resolution to cover the islands. I'm processing the terrain now to test.

---------- Post added at 02:32 ---------- Previous post was at 01:28 ----------

I've enlarged the terrain to 16384 meters sq., it is processing now. I wonder whether I can, after the tiles are generated, resize the 1024 sat images for the seafloor down to 256 x 256 since the shader doesn't care what size the source is. I think I'll try leaving the island orthophotos at full size and shrinking the seafloor ones to cut down on filesize.

---------- Post added at 03:18 ---------- Previous post was at 02:32 ----------

Processed the ortho, mask, and normal maps, deleted the paa's, resized the png's, and tried to run Buldozer on them to convert to paa, but it isn't having it: invalid argument error 22... looking now for a batch conversion utility.

---------- Post added at 03:19 ---------- Previous post was at 03:18 ----------

Should have mentioned I sized them all (except for the 4-tile section of my test island) to 128. Wondering now if at 256 or 512 Buldozer would cooperate...

---------- Post added at 03:56 ---------- Previous post was at 03:19 ----------

Used Pal2Pace to convert the 1452 images, deleted the png's, ran Buldozer, exported the wrp, and then ran pboProject with no errors :) Firing up A3 now to see if it worked. Should have said earlier that this map started as basically a copy of my Williamsburg terrain, 8192 meters sq., which weighs in currently at 269,920 kb, and now the new terrain is 16384 m sq. at 146,312 kb, and higher res detail in the important parts. Hope this works...

---------- Post added at 05:02 ---------- Previous post was at 03:56 ----------

Just played the map and it works beautifully. In the test island I actually enlarged the tile to 2048 px and replaced it with a higher res orthophoto, and it looks great, and the 128 px tiles under the sea show enough color to show reefs and shoals. I'm thrilled. Now to get the real terrain model in and start moving over all the real assets I've been developing.

Now the *real* works begins ;) hehe

I'm making two 16384 maps too, one with considerable water area ;) I can't wait to see how your work will turn out. I wish you many sleepless and creative nights ;)

Ha ha, thanks. I rolled out of bed after four hours of sleep, wife says I was talking about the map in my sleep, gotta get back to it. By the way do you know if water will cull terrain in the distance? If not I'm a bit leery of using a 4m resolution elevation model for such a large map.

Update:

I now have a satellite lco (really it is aerial photos from airplanes, but who's arguing?) in my 16384 m sq map with an effective resolution of 0.5 m/pixel, equivalent to using a 32768 px image.

Huzza!