Will we have mountains and abysses procedurally generated with kilometers of depth and height in the game?
TL;DRVery tall mountains and deep drops are technically already possible, but steep terrain stretches textures and making it look good is still a challenge, with possible fixes (more assets, dynamic resolution) maybe coming in future.
In a certain way, yes. So short answer, yes, we can do it. The problem lies with making it look good. So right now, it depends on how steep it is. If it's very steep, then you will see a lot of stretching, because we're using a height map to offset the terrain up and down. It's basically pushing the triangles up and down. And if it's a very steep up or down, then it only has a few triangles to cover that space and it will stretch it out. You might have seen this before in other games or in some of our areas where we've gone a bit too bold: the textures will stretch out. And we need to find a way to cover that up. Ideally, we would add more assets in that area or dynamically increase the resolution of those steeper areas. But this is stuff that might come down in the future.
So that's not any limitation on the actual height, or whatever the inverse of height is?
No, from a tech point of view, there's already very high mountains and very deep areas. But the issue comes when you get this drop or you look down, like, whoa. Making that look good, that's still a challenge.