Sidenius
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New terrain system
🕑 Added 2025-06-29 22:43:14 +0000 UTCThree 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!
Comments
Gustaf
The next update still needs quite a bit more work, but probably August-September. The new terrain system won't be in this update though, but possibly in the one after.
Hayden
I cannot wait. When do you think well be able to play it? You have no idea how excited I am to create my wyvern OC Drakarus in this game.
0Karmaticfrost0
ooooooh im so excited!!! I will say tho, i could see adding multiple worlds for future DLC. Obv. this soooo far ahead but it would be cool to travel around diff parts of the world. Not as one big map but as load in areas. What i will say for the possible future of the current map we can see. (this depends on the lore of ur world btw) It would be cool to have massive floating islands, insane cracks/pits/ caves big enough for the dragon to fly into etc. Since imo, every single open world game I've played always has basic forests and mountains despite being in a world with magical creatures. I never understood why all the crappy cash grab games have some pretty magical worlds but horrible models and gameplay. It would be refreshing for a game that looks this gorgeous to have some impossible scenery. Not in a computer crashing way, but in a, "omg there's a giant pit that makes this dragon look like its the size of a bus" way.
