The Overworld is here, with a new twist. Forget the repetitive extremely low poly terrain. The new one is smooth (kind of). You can deform it however you like. Overhangs, caves, mountains, caves inside mountains with overhangs. You name it. But here is more. The world size is huge. I mean extremely huge. You can set it for now from 64 units to 4096. And did I mention you can enjoy this at 60+FPS. But wait, there is more. On a previous post we talked about water. On the updated version you can also swim forever. No fatigue, no oxygen limitations (at least for now). Furthermore, water is ever expanding, which means no matter how far you travel you can always find it underground. Now, let’s talk about decorations. On this update we spawn one kind of tree and some different types of rock models. Those are just placeholders. Stay tuned, as on the next update these will be replaced by the new models.

Technical stuff:

The terrain has a whole new architecture. Each world consists of big chunks and small chunks. Big chunks’ size is 16 x 128 x 16. Those are responsible for quick loading times of the world and the (sort of) occlusion culling. Now, each big chunk consists of small chunks (8 x 8 x 8). This allows us to deform the terrain in a fast and satisfying, I must say, way.

The water now is updated on each deform tick. It is designed in a way that not only is fast and responsive but produces nice results.

For the decoration spawning, we used the one and only Poisson disc sampling method. The trees use a 2D implementation, as we want them to spawn only on the surface, whereas the rocks use a 3D implementation.

Let’s move on to the funny stuff. BUGS. Oh boy, we have plenty of them. First and foremost, when you drop too many items from your inventory the terrain collider gets angry and disappears (work in progress). You can place a bridge extremely close to another bridge, but this is not necessarily a bad thing as we may implement a way to combine these meshes and create a more interesting bridge. Last bug not least (see what I did there?!?!?! HA) you can fly out of bounds. DO NOT TRY THIS, I REPEAT. DO. NOT. TRY. THIS. You may never fly back inside the map. In this case, I would recommend to go back to the main menu and start over.

Thanks for reading this. Hope you like our new stuff. This was Serafeim. Till the next one, see ya.