Tessellation on decals

[Alienhead]

For such things as footprints, tire tracks etc.. going down into the terrain.

[Josh]

I did some experiments with this, but I couldn't make anything that looked good, and it's more expensive. If I switch to deferred lighting it will not work at all.

I may implement roads in a slightly different manner, not using the decals system, in which case it might be possible to use displacement for tire ruts and such. At one point early in development I actually had a system for pasting images onto the terrain. This is actually from pre-version 4. I called these "stamps".

I generally don't like to implement the same thing two different ways, but in the case of terrain it might make sense, since they can be treated as a 2D surface.