Dear Islanders,

We are still working hard on the global island update. Since our last post, we’ve fully finished placing and fine-tuning the sand textures: the general background sand, the ridge sand of the seabed mixed with wet sand, the wet shoreline sand gradually blending into shell sand, the placement of individual ridge patches to mimic tide-formed ripples, and a special sand zone with leaves and branches that serves as a natural transition from beach to forest.

We’ve also completed the placement and setup of the grass and mountain soil textures. Nine paths are now finished and in place. Cliff and rock textures have been added in preliminary form — they still need more polish.

The actual placement of textures wasn’t the hardest part — the real challenge was the polishing. We had to ensure smooth transitions between different textures and guarantee that each one only appears exactly where it should. For example: grass and soil textures must not spawn in the sea or on the beach; shell sand must only appear between wet sand and leafy sand; wet sand must be strictly limited to where the water meets the shore — and so on.

All of this has to be done procedurally with MapMagic 2. We deliberately avoid manual painting, because the procedural approach gives us far more control and flexibility. Later, object placement will be tied directly to textures. Since the world map covers about 3 km² and we need to place thousands of objects (trees, bushes, around 30 types of grass, rocks, sticks, driftwood, shells, mushrooms, and much more), doing this manually would be impossible for such a small team. Thanks to procedural generation, however, this becomes a manageable task.

What remains is to refine the rock and cliff textures, and to enrich the grass and mountain soil with a few additional textures for ravines, slopes, landslides, and small uplands.

Today we faced another challenge. As the graph grows, recalculation times are becoming unacceptably long. To fix this, we’ll split the main graph into several sub-graphs using MapMagic’s biomes system. We’ll start with splines, moving all related blocks into their own sub-graph, then do the same for the beaches since they’re already complete. This alone should greatly reduce the load on the main graph and speed things up. After that, we’ll return to finishing the remaining textures and then move on to object placement.

We must admit — we were overly optimistic when we thought we could complete the global island update in just 2–3 weeks. We’ve faced more challenges than expected, but we’ve still managed to accomplish everything we planned (though it took more time and energy than we imagined). A more realistic target for completing the update is now the end of October 2025.

We keep working. Everything will turn out great. Thank you all for your support!