The best terrain editor?

Out of these:

TerraEd

T.Ed

A.L.E

which is the best terrain editor?

Rogue Vector

did you give PnP terrain creator a try?
http://www.pnp-terraincreator.com/

Use your own in-house system so you have one that actually does what you want instead of having to work around another person's work.

Out of those three T.ED is the better one.

Few things not to fond of in it like the GUI, but hey, its great and fastest.

Terra ED is pretty good, but SLOW in editor mode. But very good all in one

Ale, well not my favorite, buggy, but good.

Yes! and it keeps crashing on my machine. I think they need to work out some of the instability.

What I'm looking for is something that can produce fully textured terrains as good as (or near to) the ones found here:
http://www.lionhead.com/bw2/screenshots.html

It's the textures that are the important thing to me.

Building a terrain from a height map is the easy bit.

Getting the grass, rock and water to look right and adding paths and roadways - now that's tricky.

What I've got so far looks fine from a certain distance but when your close up to the terrain textures they get blurry and indistinct.

Filax did an amazing landscape demo a while back now, I think it's on the French Blitz site under Landscape2.

I want something that can acheive this standard.

Rogue Vector

A few things to consider when looking at these tools..

ALE is geared towards mesh terrains, you can export a heightmap but the best looking textures go with the mesh export (.b3d). You can also load objects onto the terrain, position, and export a "prop file" Lightmapping is great and includes the objects..so the house you plop down cast shadows on the terrain..nice bonus. You can scale the texture so that it looks highly detailed when close up.

TerraED is loaded with a lot of features, but as Falelorn said it slows down the more objects you place/ load in. Also consider the terrain is made by painting colors (not textures) onto the landscape, then tiling a high res detail texture over the terrain. This does look really nice, but you won't be able to use textures. (If you want to try this method out for free, try TotalTerrain in the toolbox. Paint a colormap, then when you load a terrain in blitz, texture layer 2 with a detail texture)

T.ED looks very promising, it can do both methods above..the only thing lacking is the object import but the author stated it's coming. The interface is pretty slick and easy to use, and it's fast as well. The other two are not actively being worked, wheras T.ED seems to get updates every other week or so (it's also the newest of the three)

Hope that helps

T.ED updates alot, version 3 out today, and its looking NICE

I spent alot of time working on my own terrain system, always tweeking and adjusting it. Then I found T.ED and discovered I could save alot of time, and I like the look and feel of T.ED.

There are some nice terrain editors out there, so download them and try them out.