Hi dev(s), I liked the style of RWR a lot (I think the visuals are my favourite so far) and I was just wondering how it might work behind the scenes in the graphics department . I did some experiments a few months back combining decals and some shaders.

http://imgur.com/LZEjKjh
http://imgur.com/ppFVyZj
http://imgur.com/JqYsSRe
http://imgur.com/rXlJGDE

The color layers in the terrain I rendered those using a distance field image and baked the pixel values to the vertices of the terrain mesh and then with the interpolation per vertex and a shader I figured it'd look kind of similar. Also I tried using decals to add finer detail at some places.

For the outlines I haven't tried anything yet. I thought about filtering the image using some high pass filter to the rendered image as a post processing effect(?)

Anyway it has been fun!! Beautiful visuals. I'm jealous!

Cool, looking pretty much spot on!

Terrain surface rendering in RWR is based on the well known texture splatting technique (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_splatting), with alpha blending done using alpha rejection to achieve sharp edges between layers. Additionally, various higher detail noise maps are used to manipulate the value originating from the map-wide splat map for each layer to cause higher resolution distortion between layers.

Furthermore, the layer edges are accentuated with some colorization, usually something dark to make them have those cartoony outlines. The vertex and pixel shaders themselves, and plenty of old, non-used or otherwise experimental shader code, can be found if you unzip media/data1.pak and look into terrain.*.

The dynamic surface effects, blood splats, tire marks, snow and such are done with pretty much the same technique, just rendered as a second pass over the actual terrain.

I hope that answered the question at least in part!

Thanks for anwering! I'll be looking at the files and see what I can learn
I'll probably make another attempt this time using some noise for the details