this.
there is no incentive to bring back terrain, not a lot of people play the game and literally nobody is going to make use of terrain, make maps or make builds on maps when there is no one to play with
a quote from badspot from an old thread:
-snip-
I have found the quote. This was posted way back in 2014 and he does have indeed a point there. The problem with Torque engine has always been that you have to be creative, because TGE is so limited when it comes to game developing. In case you missed it from the GarageGames community, the water shader did in fact work with the terrain and interiors - the Modernization Kit for TGE is an example of this.
The suggested anti aliasing feature is to create more realistic depth and get rid of the pixels that make the game still look like old. When you combine the anti aliasing and terrain and interiors, you could have a new shining game and a final version. The modding community can then steamroll again with making more realistic maps, better then we had before 2012.
The problems with maps before their removal was in my opinion that low quality textures was also a problem. There is a sort of ghetto fix that if you use the right high quality textures and shrink them to 256x256, everything is still looking good.
Chervorzk is an example of this. Back in the old days when I played, there were servers hosted with terrain maps for Team Deathmatch and Freebuild. It was kinda 50/50, there was a group that liked the Slate maps (e.g. desert, winter, rain, sea and grass version) and the other group hosted servers with terrain and interior maps (e.g. Bedroom, Kitchen, GSF maps and Slopes). There were always people playing, no matter which map was actually hosted.
But like I have said, the choice is up to Badspot. If I were a game developer I would at least have worked out a prototype of the suggested ideas and see how the community would respond to it.