Silvan · Engine Programmer

Yeah, I'm seeing that too. The thing is, that's mostly decided by art, how they want to set it up. Of course, it's measured based on performance. But Gen 12 and Vulkan will improve performance, and I think we will scale it up at one point. But I'm not sure what exactly is planned there, if there's anything official yet.

Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

Yeah, plans, not concrete, but definitely discussions with the Planet Tech team about how we can take things one level higher. At the moment, basically, each object is considered an individual object in the scene. It's spawned and we manage the position of it. We do have some small-scale grouping. We might group five or 10 objects together. But what you need if you want to, say, render an entire rainforest is the ability to have millions of trees. And just having the concept of an individual tree exist means that becomes beyond the reach of a sensible-speed computer. You need to have the concept of: this is a patch of forest that might be a kilometer wide or 10 kilometers wide. And the trees either never existed individually, only as a group, or they are being spawned extremely quickly and then merged into one Uber clump that we just have to submit to the GPU, or not even submit to the GPU, but just render on the GPU without any CPU involvement. But the current approach of having one object constructed and then sent to the GPU each frame just doesn't scale quite to the level we need. Gen 12 will give us a big boost on what would be possible with the current system. But there's plans for the extreme modes, we'd call them, like the rainforest, where you can just see for miles and miles of trees. That needs something slightly different for that to work.

Silvan · Engine Programmer

And all these objects on the planets are already using a more specialized path to be rendered much quicker than our usual objects, like all those brushes. But as Ali pointed out, if we want to have really dense, lush forests like you've seen in Microsoft Flight Simulator, there's definitely a lot of room to improve, and it's definitely something we're looking at and aware of, and hopefully we'll implement something in the future for that.