Hey enn0x, thanks for the advice. My thoughts are:
I want people to be able to take shortcuts. Part of the reason for random levels is to force people to make quick navigation decisions in an unfamiliar environment.
Yeah, that is a problem, and I haven’t yet decided how to deal with it. I’ll either generate a heightmap and carve roads out of it, or generate a road mesh and triangulate the intervening regions.
My gut instinct would be to make the entire terrain one material, and set the friction/speed of the vehicle depending on whether it’s in the vicinity of a road (as defined by the heightmap).
Yeah, I have tried Bullet vehicles before and they tend to be a bit squirrelly. Whether or not I can get them to work will determine how I build the levels, so I want to get the vehicle physics squared away before diving into any hardcore geometry.