I would like to have caves and entrances to underground spaces in my game. Is there a way to put holes in the terrain map?
The other way I could do it is to use a large polygon mesh as the terrain, with a large texture map. This would be very customizable, and fine, really, but I worry about performance issues. Would the performance suffer much by having a big poly map of say, 1024 x 1024 squares… that’s 2 million triangles, and a texture map of maybe 4096 squared? that would be 16 million pixels? That seems like the alternative to using a terrain map.