By this I mean the points where the triangles on smooth terrain connect. Let us place them ourselves with an API or some sorts. Look at literally every big 3D (non cube-ey) game out there. They make terrain out of simple triangles and the performance is astonishing compared to roblox’s. The reason being that Roblox smooth terrain has much more triangles per square ‘meter’ than any game out there. Imagine if we could place the three points of a triangle each 50 studs from each other and have it treated like terrain. It’s textured, connects with nearby terrain, and doesn’t require so much CPU process to run.
I may be off in some places on this post but I don’t think there’s any denying that the only way we can realistically get large open world games is with a feature of this sort.
I hope some admin sees this and thinks ‘oh this isn too much work, well just open the API we already use to them’
There is no “vertex API” that can be exposed, the smooth terrain surface is computed from the occupancy values (and material) of the cells and the fact that collisions aren’t 100% perfect confirms that the physics engine does not have access to the vertices either (or approximates collisions). If they even have an internal array of vertices somewhere deep down in the rendering code, I doubt they can bring this up and expose to Lua due to performance related reasons, and I don’t think you would be able to edit it just like that. There are probably voxel-based assumptions in the engine (made prior to rendering) that make it impossible to have “random” vertices and also have somewhat proper physics at the same time.
What do you mean “require so much CPU processing power”? I can play a large terrain map on my phone without issues, and the phone is quite old. Zeuxcg also recently did an LOD update to terrain I thought?
LOD has not been implemented yet; there was an update about memory reduction that does not change visuals. When LOD ships it will change visuals (e.g. far away terrain will be less detailed) in favor of performance - this work is still underway though since the technology is quite involved.