Will Hain · Engine Programmer 3, Planet Tech

Cliff sides. So the new river cliffs in 3.18 are really cool, actually. So the piece of technology that allows them to exist is this thing called on-demand spawn points. I won't go into too much technical detail, but the spawning system is run by a piece of code called Biome Builder, which I help look after in Planet Tech. And that has lots of cells across the planet, a grid of cells across the entire planet, each of which have a set of spawn points. Spawn points are usually random, and then they take their properties from the terrain in order to decide what to spawn. On-demand spawn points is a little bit of code that allows us to hook into that and say, we want a spawn point here. We want it right here. And we want an object to appear. And you can even specify some overriding stuff as well, which is pretty cool. Now that was developed for the rivers and then for the cliffs, to allow us to say, well, we've got all these rules about where we want such and such a rock, but you can't always just cover for this all in rule sets. Sometimes you need specific art direction. Sometimes you need to say, well, this is a river gorge. We need a wall of river cliffs going along the side. So that's the kind of tech that's driven that. We want to be able to place this on naturally occurring cliffs across the planet as well, which will be really cool, because then when you get those really steep slopes that naturally appear on our planets anyway, we will be able to populate them with the really beautiful cliff meshes. But there's also some rumours and some talks about going a different direction with that and doing more of a technical approach, which I won't spoil, but it would be really cool if we end up doing that. I hope we do. But the on-demand spawn points are driving it at the moment, and they're really cool.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

More of a technical approach?

Will Hain · Engine Programmer 3, Planet Tech

More of a technical approach. GPU-y stuff. I'm not going to spoil. That's not my place to spoil.