Some things can be learned from minecraft. It's not world size that makes a difference, but how much you show it at the time. If you need a real Earth model, you need to stream it from existing data sources. I'm not sure if Google-maps contain height information. If it does, you can use splines to smoothen out the details in between. Then again i'm not sure if that also counts as "blurred". There simply isn't height data in 10 meter accuracy propably anywhere, and such database would be measured in terabytes.
Could add that with Earth data we are working in 2D pretty much. So possible optimizations go propably for quadtree, not octtree. Any data can be indexed or arranged in such a way that you can look them up quickly. Especially for project like this, you can expect that "player" doesn't make any changes to the terrain, so it's possible all the data can be in static sized blocks. That simplifies things.
Oh, also the Earth topic might go on another thread entirely? Not so related to texture generation at all now.
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