Outdoor terrain

I've been experimenting with TerraEdit a lot and this is what I've learnt this far:

• Try to make your grids not too small. 16 x 16 and a width of 64 units is OK. I made a small cave and hade a 8 x 8 grid with a grid size of 64 (this makes the entire grid 512 x 512 units).
  
• When subtracting and doing CSG operations. Make sure the surfaces are at least 2 units wide! If they're smaller it's very likely you'll end up with a nice BSP hole.
  
• It's easy to make good looking caverns with TerraEdit. First make the floor and save it, then make the roof. You'll have to look at it as some kind of mold where the two parts must match exactly except where the space of the cave is supposed to be.
  Import both into UnrealEd and add them somewhere where there's lots of open space. Make a big box brush, as big as the brush you built in TerraEd. In my case a made a 512 x 512 x 256 (256 was the max height in my height map). Subtract this brush where you want the cave. Now you only have to add the floor (the lower part) and the ceiling of the cave (the upper part) and you're done.
  Be prepared to fail, it's rather tricky making this work and you'll have to experiment a lot to get a result that is satisfying.
  
• Do not intersect TerraEd brushed with each other! You'll probably end up with tons of BSP holes and a very high polycount (which isn't very good).

So how high may the polycount be? In Unreal is was maxiumum 150, in UT it's about 250 and some newer maps have polycounts of 600 (DM-Falkenstein). A polycount of 600 - 800 is usually OK on a GeForce graphics card but will be very choppy on a Voodoo 2 class graphics card. Keep the polycount about 200 - 300 and you're safe.
You can view the polycount by entering "STAT FPS" in the console.

Good Luck!

you can intersect\deintersect with terraedit brushes. bsp problems do often arise, but not always.

The WareFare Editor was just the name of the new updated Editor for the WareFare Engine. The terrain editing portion of it is for the new Large Scale Terrain support in the new engine. You can read about it at http://www.epicgames.com

Yes, and you heard right. Pretty awesome numbers.