Sebastian Schroeder · Principal Technical Environment Artist, Planet Content Team

If we're talking about local altitude and depth, I guess people can refer back to the CitizenCon talk from two years ago, when Ali talked about the planet tech at length. I think he went into this issue at length. What has changed recently: there was a hard-coded limit to the global elevation. That has now been drastically increased, and so we will be doing more with that and having more height differences across the whole planet, but not necessarily in a very local area, because it still has the same issues of texture stretching and that stuff, which isn't gone until... Some of the things that are being worked on will hopefully make the planet shader much cheaper again. And then we can afford to do things like triplanar projection of textures on the terrain. And then we might be able to finally confidently do very steep slopes and have assets integrate with them. But until then, we really won't be doing super steep terrain parts.