heh

I'm still not sure it'd work. Say I break the area up into five pieces. That means I'd end up with a minimum of 4 seams across the entire area.

That's a lot of small stones/plants/whatever that'd have to be placed in a very obvious manner to cover the seam

Also, based on the number of times I'm tiling my texture at the moment (to get a good resolution), I'd need to split the model into 25 parts to avoid tiling altogether.

Don't slice the cave not like a bread... instead you are making the slices at points u wont notice them alot. And guess what... caves are no walls with bricks, plaster or whatever so i don't think its really a problem to get rid of the seams...

Second solution is make a cement part between 2 big parts e.g a door frame that way you wont see any seams at all.

But lots of seams requires lots of additional models

What is stopping you?

Well, I wonder if I've explained it well.

My cave isn't like a dungeon with straight walls and a perfect roof. It's a natural (ish) looking cave of about 5000 polygons. It's basically a stretched sphere.

As far as I can tell, therefore, any seams I make will go all the way around the room. It isn't, therefore, possible to hide the seam in some corner where it cannot be seen. Also, to cover it in props, I'd need to place some kind of prop all the way along the seams. I can't think of a way of doing it without the seam being obvious due to a huge number of props in a line

Seems like tiling texturing is the only choice you'll have then.
You can still add decals on top later.

Unless you can create your entire model in your modelling program and then do a perfect slice all around it. You will need to place them very precisely in the world editor, though. Plus, you'll have quite some textures if you have a long tunnel.
I'd stick with tiling textures.

well no, thats old fashion if you ask me.. just split the cave up in several parts.. did you have seen any cave with nice edges etc?? well that would be a first xD

but anyhow maybe this link gives you more an idea how you make a cave level: http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/idtech...levels.php

And btw just use align to grid to make it fit correctly.. all you have to do is making the parts in the same resolution/dimension.

hm, that last link is interesting.

It's a very different style to what I'm doing at the moment, but it might work.
Decals I didn't consider, I can't seem to find any information regarding how they work or what they can do. Do they simply project a black and white image onto a polygon face?