Hello,

I am hoping to utilize Gazebo to create a simulator for ships and UAVs in large ocean environments, probably using UUV simulator which is essentially a set of gazebo plugins on top of the base software. The only problem is that the environments I would be using are exceptionally large (say 30 km by 30 km) and based on the digital elevation model tutorial, "Usually, DEM files have big resolutions and Gazebo cannot handle it".

Thus it seems Gazebo cannot handle loading large DEM based terrain. In light of this, I was planning on splitting the terrain into chunks, say 1 km by 1km, and then as the vehicle moves through the environment the terrain would be dynamically loaded and de-loaded depending on where the vehicle is. Could anyone please advise me if this is a realistic strategy, or if there is an alternative for working with large environments in Gazebo? Thank you.