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People are really impressed with the snow, in particular, with the way it deforms around characters’ feet as they walk and run through it. Can you delve into how you’ve achieved that?
Wenyong: We used Unreal Engine’s Virtual Heightfield Mesh (VHM) to create dynamic snow. VHM itself could help add more details to terrain. Coupled with high-quality textures made by our colleagues, we are able to make a relatively realistic snow scene. Considering VHM is currently at an experimental stage, there are still some unsolved problems left. But overall, we think this feature is worthy of further study.
I tried finding people’s (developers) takes on it but there’s nothing really exciting, just “wow” reactions. I don’t think the levels are designed too big for the performance to really matter. If you notice in the trailer it seems all enclosed areas where it happens so I doubt you could do this on a grand scale without A.I. based LOD of some sort. Maybe for example you could make it on a grand scale but there’s so much “fog” from the snow storm that it makes the tessellation invisible after so much distance and the player wouldn’t know better that it was removed and loaded as needed. It would probably have to be saved/loaded like minecraft does whenever it renders new cells of the world.