Are mountains going to be taller than the cloud layers on planets? [There has been discussion on Spectrum about height map limits.] What can you tell us?

Technically, or theoretically, there's nothing holding us back from having the mountain peaks stick through the clouds. However, at the moment, the clouds, as people who do their landings know, are not really that volumetric yet. It's something that's high on our to-do list and on our wish list that's being worked on. We want to make sure that if we allow the player to travel through the clouds on a mountain peak, that experience is what you would expect it to be. So you want to traverse through a thick layer of clouds and just be in the middle of it, just like you would if you fly with an airplane, for example. So that's one of the reasons why we felt like it's not quite the right moment for it yet, because right now it would not be that experience.

Just to hook onto that thread that Ali responded to and just the general questions about steepness and terrain height: I think Ali did a really good job of explaining it and trying to explain why there's a limitation or what the issues are that we're running into. Actually, I have a little video prepared just to help me with that, because I've been reading that thread, so I sort of expected this would come. I just recorded this little example of what actually happens with the terrain and how terrain is basically functioning. So we have a patch of mesh, polygons, and we have our height map and it's displaced. So it's stretching up and down, right? This is based on just a height map of a piece of terrain that goes in and it's pushed out. And what you'll see is sometimes with these triangles or polygons, they get stretched. So the steeper it is, the more they will get stretched. And some of the issues that we'll run into, and I prepared this one as a bit more stylized version of it. This is basically a grid with polygons doing the same thing, a very simple height map that will displace it. And these are basically our textures applied. And what you'll see happen is if there's a smoothness, these textures will remain quite nice and smooth, and they will not distort or displace too much. But what you'll see on the steeper areas is that these textures will get really, really stretched. And it's a very old-school problem to have. But it's one that is also quite hard to fix, especially if you're dealing with a whole planet's worth of height content that is doing all kinds of things. Some games fix this by covering up a lot of these surfaces with additional geometry. That's what we also do. But the steeper it is... and this is just the textures problem. But also, if you look at the triangles or the polygons, it's the same issue. We distribute our assets based on these points, these vertices. And if an area is super stretched, the more stretched it is, there's actually no points to attach these assets to. So they will find a spot to spawn on and it will look very jarring. So if there's not enough geometry to support it, it will cause issues. The steepness is a bit of a technical limitation, and that's the reason why it's hard to do and get results that are very visually satisfying as well, because we can do higher stuff, especially on the large scale. I think Ali said it as well: if you want a very high mountain, you would have to do a bit of a pyramid shape. The top maximum height might be more than six, seven, 10 kilometers. But in order to get there, you would have to do it very gradually. And I think that's what happens in most situations on Earth and most large-scale mountain ranges as well. Yes, the maximum height is very high, but in order to get there, you're traveling kilometers and kilometers on the horizontal axis as well before you hit that highest point. And we sort of had to make a compromise saying, well, in a patch of four by four kilometers, how much would you expect the maximum height difference to be? How steep would it be? And we sort of settled on a maximum of two kilometers between the lowest and highest point. And if you combine that with the height map on the planet itself, which doesn't really have a limitation, we could go way higher. But then it would be less steep, but the maximum height and lowest point would be more than one or two kilometers apart. I hope that sort of makes it a bit clearer.