Next update is done! The main thing is that the new landscape is in the game now! There are new game builds that can be downloaded so anyone can see it. On the next update, I thought I would add a way to teleport to the different areas to make it easier to see them as I’m working on them.
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For this update, I’ve been working on getting the landscape more fleshed out, trying to concept out how the different rocky areas will look together and making sure all the streams go downhill.
The dynamic topology mode has, so far, really been the perfect thing to use for what I’m doing. With it, I’ve been able to create natural rock bridges and overhangs, and basically just create whatever I wanted, while still having complete control as to how dense the vertices were. Another really great thing is that I’m able to cut up the landscape however I want instead of having a grid, so there are large sections of the landscape that won’t even be rendered since they are behind other parts of the landscape. Even further, the streams and rivers are cut up into smaller sections, so I should be able to make it pretty detailed in the end since only a small part is visible at a time. None of this would have been possible if I had used the landscape abilities that are in the Unreal Engine. One caveat is that, after everything was cut up, I found out Unreal looks at the bounding box of the mesh to test if it should be rendered instead of if the actual polygons are visible, so hopefully in future landscape updates I’ll be able to cut it up in a way that keeps this in mind and make it even better. 
Also, since I could control how dense the vertices were anywhere in the landscape, I have been able to make the landscape more detailed while cutting the final triangle count by about half of what the original landscape was. From about 6.5 million to about 3.5 million. Interestingly, it also cut the size of the download for the game by about 200mb.
Here is a screenshot of how I cut up the landscape, and the density of the landscape at Level of Detail 0:
, and here are some screenshots of how some of the areas look so far inside the game:
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There is another new spontaneous piano session in the game under Session 4 and on SoundCloud here: Stream Spontaneous Piano_Session 4 by ArtOfLight | Listen online for free on SoundCloud I tried to do a lot of, what I like to call, note cascades, and it really turned out pretty. I also found out that the way I was reducing noise in the audio was really distorting some of the notes, but with this new way of doing it, everything is much more clear.
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I’ve also been working on getting a plan on how the weather system is going to work, but it’s still in the concept stage, so there isn’t much to show. Just graphs of how it all connects together.
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One last thing that was kind of neat that happened a few weeks ago is that, as you know, windows 10 always has a random image display at the log in screen, but the interesting thing was when I turned on my computer one morning, I was surprised to find this image of a waterfall that was very close to what I had already sculpted out for a waterfall in my landscape. This isn’t the image I had seen, but you can see the waterfall here: Panorama Waterfall Haew Suwat Khao Yai Stock Photo (Edit Now) 582538609 and here is what I had sculpted in my landscape:
. It even has the archway that I had put over the outgoing stream. I thought that was a pretty cool thing to have happen, that I’ll now have a pretty good reference image of this area that I had basically just concept sculpted from imagination.