2026-09-18
Gap: Vegetation placed off outdated terrain and in water
Trees, reeds, and shrubs are placed across the game's world map after its ground and rivers are generated. This placement pass had drifted out of sync with the terrain it was meant to sit on, and a separate problem sat in the shrub models used in the same pass. This entry covers both.
Gap: Vegetation placed off outdated terrain and in water
The placement pass read an out-of-date copy of the terrain and carried no rule against water. Four example sites showed the range of the problem: a tree standing clear of a riverbank, two tree crowns buried in a hillside with no trunks visible, two trunks standing in open water, and one site where an earlier terrain reading implied a line of trees on a slope that, read correctly, cannot support them.
The placement pass was rebuilt to read the same, current terrain data used to draw the ground and rivers, and it now excludes any position inside water. Re-rendering the same four sites afterward showed trees rooted at ground level with visible trunks, reeds following the riverbank, and nothing standing in moving water. The one site with the earlier bad reading stayed bare after the fix, confirming that line of trees had never matched the real slope.
Gap: Shrub rendering cost far exceeded their size on screen
An early version of four shrub types kept too many triangles in their distant-view meshes, and the default planting density produced about one frame per second in a full scene.
Several revisions cut the four shrubs' combined distant-view triangle count from about 197 million to about 82 million across a 2.4-kilometer view (one shrub type's distant mesh alone fell from 1,620 triangles to 243), while keeping each shrub's close-up detail and silhouette recognizable. The planting density was then lowered to a level testing confirmed held between roughly 30 and 50 frames per second, up from about 1.
