Dear islanders,

We’re continuing our work on the global island update. At the moment, we’re about halfway done with placing coastal rock textures. As I mentioned earlier, we strictly avoid using brushes — all textures are placed procedurally through nodes in Map Magic 2.

We try to apply each texture according to specific conditions: at a certain height, under a certain slope, inside depressions, on ridges, only near water, in specific regions of the island, and so on. In most cases, we combine several conditions at once. For example, the mossy rock texture only appears on narrow erosion grooves along cliff slopes — the same paths where rainwater naturally flows down.

We also aim to blend every primary texture with several secondary ones, to avoid uniformity and repetition. A lot of time goes into fine-tuning transitions, seams, and smooth blending between materials.

Earlier, we encountered a serious issue that slowed us down quite a bit — we needed to “highlight” specific areas of the island (coastal cliffs) at precise slopes and elevations, but without affecting other areas with the same parameters elsewhere. We struggled with this for a long time using standard MM2 tools, but nothing worked properly.

Finally, we managed to write two custom tools that completely solved the problem. In short, our script temporarily lowers the entire island by 40 meters, except for the target areas we want to isolate. Then we process those selected regions as needed — adjusting their size, applying smoothing, setting step values, and so on — and generate a dedicated heightmap. This heightmap is then imported back into the graph and used as a mask.

This was a huge breakthrough for us — now we can accurately highlight and isolate any part of the island we want.

We’re currently continuing the placement and polishing of rock textures. Object placement hasn’t started yet — we’ll move on to that once all textures are complete. It looks like we won’t make it by the end of this month. The new target date for completing the global island update is mid-November 2025.

We’re fully confident in our progress — everything is going according to plan.
Thank you all for your support!