Quote: "If they were to add digging into terrains to make caves etc. they would have to completely scrap all of the work they've done and start from scratch with a completely different style of terrain generation, which would not be able to use height maps because they only have two dimensional data."
Not really, the 2D data has to be converted to 3D at some point.There is nothing stopping you after the 3d data output from converting the output to either voxel or marching cubes or adding additional polygons.
While you may have to alter some code, you don't have to start from scratch, you have to remember while the initial data points are 2D, it gets converted to 3D data points, which means you can pretty much do anything to the output you want.There is nothing stopping you from discarding the heightmap information entirely after you got your output. It would only mean the data output can only move forward and not backward.
You do know for example the axis game factory voxel terrain generator starts out with a height map and you can also export as well as import heightmaps as you wish.
Terrain LOD, texture LOD, pretty much every thing from the current system will stay mostly unchanged.
The reason why we don't have a voxel system or ability to create caves and such. Is performance, plain and simple, high polygon voxel editing isn't cheap to render, but you could counter it by converting the mesh data to static or by other means once you have completed your editing.
I am fully intending to make use of the super cool terrain editing tools found in axis to create height maps and caves and if needed terrains as well.
Win10 Pro 64bit----iCore7 4770k @ 3.5GHZ----AMD RX460 2gb----16gig ram
