Lichbane

That's kind of my point. If you implement a catch up when someone enters an area then you don't need the server to manage that while no-one is in those areas. That means you can have much larger landmasses.

Couldn't it calculate trees and crops and spawn animals when a player gets in range? But that's probably require a quite a bit of work reworking the server, wouldn't it? And I suppose it would result in a spike when accessing that data when it was needed. :-(

Where's the problem? Does the server engine try and maintain the whole area all at once? Doesn't the server do chunking based on where players are and unload those areas where they are not?

So a 1024 server is about 4km on either side? Is that correct? (I've never played Wurm so using terms like Xanadu doesn't mean much to me. I'm simply looking for a vehicle to recreate Britannia (from Ultima). I've pretty much built it in World Machine. I started to build the actual game in Unity .... and along comes this which handles just about everything I was having difficulty with. I'm kind of hoping this is the answer to my creative outlet.

So just to clarify it can accommodate a heightmap of 32,768 x 32,768 pixels? That's an area a bit more than 130km on each side (a bit less as it needs to be surrounded by water)?

Is that in metres?

So what's the maximum size a map can be?

Yes. Play them in offline mode. With all due respect, that's not your problem, nor is it your business. If the developer is willing to go down the Steam path (and clearly they have weighed up the pros and cons), it's their business how much money valve take. It's no concern of anyone else. I wonder if people who are worried about Steam spying on them have a facebook account? That would be ironic. Well there's no arguing with "Duty Calls". And Owl Monkeys do make a surprisingly good point as well.

I'm curious about World Creator. Does it do terrain tiling or does it do single terrain heightmaps? I'm using World Machine for the project that I'm working on in Unity. I've got a small prototype area that I've taken from my overall world. It's a small island area about 6km x 6km. The overall project is 150km x 150km over 2,304 tiles in 8k resolution. Using some pretty cool assets in Unity (like RTP3 and Terrain Composer), I can pretty much create a very detailed world. The images below give you a bit of an idea. What I don't have is the overall game framework to go around this. This is where I'm hoping that Wurm can come in. What I need is the ability to import tiled heightmaps, splatmaps and flowmaps. The rest of it will be applying textures to the generated texture. If someone is capable of creating a tool like that, them perhaps I get realise some of the work I've done so far. That's just my 2 cents anyway.