Over the past few months we’ve been spending a lot of time refining the Promenad World Builder that powers our simulation and environment tooling.
One of the first decisions we needed to make was how terrain regions should be structured. After quite a bit of performance testing and experimentation, we standardized regions to 200 meters by 200 meters, with one quad per meter.
This gives us a terrain grid of 40,000 quads per region, which turns out to be a very practical balance between visual quality and editing performance. Terrain shaping remains responsive while still providing enough resolution to sculpt meaningful features like slopes, embankments, and shoreline transitions.
Standardizing these dimensions has also simplified planning significantly. Because every region follows the same spatial rules, we can design props, structures, and landscape elements in our 3D modeling tools using the same scale assumptions. When assets are imported into the world, they land exactly where we expect them to without additional scaling or adjustment.
The terrain shaping tools themselves have evolved quickly. The editor allows us to raise, lower, smooth, and shape terrain directly in-world with brush-based controls. Because the terrain is quad-based, operations remain predictable and easy to reason about when modifying large areas.
Painting has also become a major part of the workflow. Instead of relying on external texture baking pipelines, the editor allows materials to be painted directly onto terrain quads. This makes it easy to quickly establish environmental features such as soil, sand, vegetation, or ice while designing the landscape. Painted layers are saved in the same Promenad file, but as series of textures.
We are currently expanding this system to support more complex texture layers, allowing richer terrain blending and more natural environmental transitions.
Another area we’ve been working on is prop integration. The World Builder can now import objects directly from Promenad, allowing assets to be placed into regions at their intended scale. This removes a lot of friction from the workflow. Props created or stored in Promenad can simply be referenced and inserted into the world without needing additional conversion steps.
This also opens the door to building larger shared asset libraries where environments can be assembled from reusable components.
Finally, we’re adding support for collision marking and limits directly within the terrain editor. Instead of managing collision zones entirely through external tools, designers can mark areas of terrain or objects with collision boundaries inside the world builder itself. This makes it easier to define walkable areas, restricted zones, or physical boundaries while designing a scene.
Most of these systems are still evolving, but the underlying structure is beginning to feel solid. With standardized region sizes, predictable terrain editing, and direct asset integration from Promenad, the workflow for building environments is starting to come together in a way that feels both powerful and practical.
As the tools mature, we’ll continue documenting the engineering decisions and systems that make them work.