Hi ShadowIce,
Okay, let's nail down some parameters so I can make a tutorial.
Firstly, are you prepared to modify T3D to support larger maps or dynamic paging of map tiles, or are you going to accept the current limitations? (about 4k x 4k with a single heightfield, max texture about the same.) There's not much point going to the trouble of generating more map data in L3DT than you can display in T3D if you're using the stock build.
If you are going to modify T3D to support larger maps, what is the budget for data size? How many gigabytes of map data are you prepared to accept? I ask this because it puts some bounds on what you mean by "MMO sized" and "extremely high texture quality", and makes some options more or less attractive. I'm not going to include options you don't want.
Continuing, what geometry resolution do you need? I'd normally recommend something like 0.2-0.5m/vertex for an MMO, but it's up to you. The finer the resolution, the higher the visual detail, at the cost of either modelling a smaller physical area or having a much greater amount of data. If you're not sure, you may want to generate some random maps in L3DT and then walk around in the 3D viewer to see if they're big enough or not, detailed enough or not, etc. For starters, you might like to make a 2048x2048 pixel heightfield at 0.5m/pixel horizontal scale (this will be far too small for an MMO, but it should give you an idea of how much larger you want).
Also, do you want to do lots of hand-editing with brushes and tools, or are you after a more automagical solution? How much detail do you want in the tutorial on manual editing?
Next, we need to decide on how to handle the ground textures. If you want both massive maps and extremely high texture resolution, you're looking at a colossal amount of data if you're using pre-calculated textures (such as L3DT is usually asked to generate.) You will also need to think carefully about how to manage the texture paging, as it can't all fit into GPU memory at once. I've built an automatic megatexture paging system for my 3D renderer, but I'm pretty sure T3D has no such a beast, so you may need to do some development in T3D to handle the textures. Alternatively, you could generate the highly detailed textures on-the-fly using texture splatting, which is well supported by T3D, but if you want a higher visual quality than the standard T3D ground textures then you may have to write custom shaders and the like. To help with your decision, some time ago I wrote a little guide to different approaches for rendering ultra-high resolution ground textures, in which you can see the effect of texture splatting, precalculated ground textures (L3DT-style), grass geometry, detail maps, etc:
http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/doku.php? ... 3dt:tx_resOkay, I'll stop here for now, but depending on your answers I'm sure I'll have more questions.
Best regards,
Aaron.