New terrain system

Three weeks ago I wrote about our experiments with having a single huge game world instead of splitting it into multiple regions and some of the challenges with expanding the world size far beyond what is normally possible. Last weekend I had some new ideas for that which I started exploring this week, and the results are very exciting. For some reason I was incredibly productive and made a new breakthrough almost every day, which eventually culminated in a completely new terrain system that solves all of the problems I talked about before. If it works out, then we'll be able to have a single world that is both huge and maintains high detail up close.

With this new system, we can create the world by placing reusable stamps with mountains, rivers, roads, cliffs, etc, which saves a tonne of disk space compared to storing each individual meter as a unique value and is essential for a world of this size. It also means we can build the world inside the game editor using custom tools instead of relying on an external program, which allows for rapid iteration and is generally a huge productivity boost. And most importantly, the terrain maintains very high visual quality no matter how far away it is, whether you are flying up in the clouds or running around on the ground. It generates more details in both geometry and textures the closer you get and could go all the way to modelling individual pebbles on the ground.

It's still very early and needs more work and testing before committing fully to it, but so far it seems very promising. It's still possible there's some deal breaking limitation we run into later but for now I'm gonna keep working on it alongside all the other things to see how far it can go. I might be able to do a small sneak peek preview with it relatively soon!