I'm currently building a game engine in OpenTK (OpenGL for C#) and I wanted to know if it was possible to take a terrain mesh (in any format) and convert it into a text file (or a really small character-filled file, no more than a few bytes). Then, afterwards, I'd take that file and generate the terrain from it.

The only reason I'm doing this is to save some memory on the computer. I think it would be more efficient if we had to quickly generate a crude terrain, and then smooth it instead of loading in a large mesh file.

Is this possible, and if so, how could I do it?