Hi! I'm a new L3DT user and very impressed so far. I've got a couple of questions about mesh exporting and tiling.
What exactly does "export optimized mesh" do for optimizations? Does it only remove vertices, or does it also relocate them?
When I export a 256 x 256 heightmap as optimized mesh in OBJ format and look at it in a text editor, the X and Y coordinates are almost all integers between -128 and +127. But a few percent of the vertices have non-integer XY coords like 211.6875, 243. Is that expected? If they're all integers from -128 to 127 then I can use GL_BYTE as the vertex format in OpenGL ES to save memory, but with values like 211.6875 I can't.
Probably nobody actually uses a heightmap as small as 256x256, but a similar problem applies to larger maps when trying to use GL_SHORT instead of GL_FLOAT. I think any operation that moves a heightpost so it's no longer on a regular grid is eliminating one big advantage of using heightmaps. Or am I overlooking something?
Semi-related question: how can tiled maps be rendered with good performance, since it will create texture maps that aren't a power-of-two size? For example, a 2048x2048 map with a 256x256 tile size will generate a bunch of 257x257 tiles and textures, because there's one column and row of overlap between tiles to make them seamless. As far as I know, non-power-of-two sized textures will suffer a performance penalty when rendering, or may not even work at all on some hardware. I see there's a checkbox in the exporter to resize images to the nearest power of two, but then you'll have a 256x256 texture applied to a mesh with 257x257 vertices. Does that still look OK?
Thanks for making a great tool!