I can understand you completely and I'm the last one who wants to pressure you.
It's impressive what you did so far, I really like the way the materials are handled in the xml and object descriptions which reminds me a lot of DX10.
Currently I'm pretty busy cause of another project at work but if everything settles down I can go back to our 3d project. Basically I evaluated some engines. Got stuck for a long time with Truevision3d but realized that the closed source basis is not the right thing for us. I did some cool shaders by the way(a pretty good looking and well performing SSAO shader) which I can contribute if you want.
Later I took a look at ogre but I don't like the style you are writing with it and it's far too huge for my taste. In my opinion it feels overloaded.
From what I saw I think nGene is the right thing for us and I hope that it will be the final thing we are using cause I'm sick of looking around for alternatives. :)
Writing from scratch is something we considered but this takes far too much time which isn't neccesary when there are great projects out there.
But back to the terrain.
Is a tile_size of 4x4 possible when i have a lod of:
terrainDesc.LODs.push_back(make_pair(1, 80.0f));
terrainDesc.LODs.push_back(make_pair(2, 1e9));
In theory it should be possible, right?
It would be cool to get a terrain of the size 1024x1024 done which performs at 300fps (3,3ms) on a 8800GTX without grass.
edit:
Is there a way to disable VSync in the engine?
edit2:
After disabling the sky/grass from tutorial2_2 I saw that I'm in fact CPU bottlenecked at 120fps. This is in 1920x1200 and in 800x600 fullscreen with and without PhysX support on the GPU.
edit3:
I have been doing a quick run through Intel VTune. Nothing obvious with "int DefaultHashMethod<std::wstring>::hash(const std::wstring& key)" in HashTable.h being the most expansive function. I have no in depth knowledge about the engine so maybe you can make something out of it.
The addition in the for loop is by the way the most expansive part.
Ok, i really need to go to bed now. :D