When are they putting tiled terrain support in, this will REALLY move this game ahead of many other games, light-years ahead in-fact, in open-world possibility. I am really looking forward to this feature and it is on the road-map for your game's features. I would just like to know when to expect this, or even a rough guess if no one really knows.
Right now Beamng.drive only supports one terrain with collision. That means that while you can have a 2nd or 3rd real terrain in there along with the first, only the first will have collision (being able to interact with the car or player or other objects). The 2nd and 3rd ones won't be able to be interacted with, driven over, etc, by the player and hence the player will just fall-through it into the abyss. Tiled terrain would mean we could make more detailed terrains, and still having large maps, without stretching the terrain to make it so big.
This would definitely be a great feature but then you have to think about how we'll seamlessly combine terrains, and then also the floating point imprecision will be an obstacle. See what happens when you drive for a long time in one direction...
Floating point imprecision isn't such an obstacle until your map gets bigger than 10 miles x 10 miles. In that space, however, even a 4k terrain isn't big enough, i'd say you'd need 16 4k terrains for that space. Floating point imprecision doesn't get to be a serious map development issue until you're about 20 miles away from 0,0,0. My ROANE COUNTY map lets you get at most about 8~10 miles from 0,0,0 as it's not 100% centered (it's about 2~3 miles off). For starters, you'll run out of RAM before you hit distance issues. The forest brush in Roane County (and even in Tail of the Dragon to a lesser extent) requires several GB of RAM for all those trees, forest objects like houses, etc. The RAM footprint holds location, collision, etc. You will hit that wall long before anything else unless you're making things like ATS where it's just the roadways and with nothing but dummy mountains and unreachable space in between where the roads go to. No, really, Roane County had twice or three times the trees it currently does, but before, it needed 10gb of ram to load it (!!!!).
