What's New
We completely rebuilt how you see the world in Novus Terminus: First Flags -- and then we filled that world with grass.
The camera now follows you, not the other way around. The old camera felt disconnected -- zooming meant fiddling with distance-to-focus, and rotating always seemed to move the wrong thing. The new system works the way your brain expects: press forward to go forward, scroll to see more or less of the map, and drag to look around. When you're zoomed in close, the camera tilts to a near-ground perspective so you can watch your settlers walk past. Pull back, and it smoothly transitions to a bird's-eye strategic view where you can plan your next expansion. There's no manual pitch or zoom slider to manage -- the camera just does what feels right based on how high above the terrain you are. Edge panning, smooth momentum, terrain-aware clamping so you never clip through a hillside -- it all just works.
Then there's the grass. We wanted meadows that feel alive, not painted-on textures. The result is roughly three million individual grass blades swaying in the wind across every meadow and forest on the map. Each blade catches the light differently -- darker at the roots where sunlight doesn't reach, brighter at the tips. A gentle breeze ripples through the field, and because the wind phase shifts across the landscape, you see rolling waves of motion rather than everything swaying in lockstep. Up close, it looks dense and lush. Pull the camera back, and the grass gracefully fades into the terrain colour, so there's never a harsh pop-in line at the horizon.
The difference is dramatic. Where the map used to be flat painted tiles with a few placeholder cones, it now feels like a living landscape. Meadows have depth and texture. Forests have a dark carpet of undergrowth. And all of it runs at a smooth 60 FPS.
Behind the Scenes
Getting three million blades of grass to run at 60 FPS was not our first attempt. We tried several approaches -- one looked like green worms, another brought the frame rate down to single digits. The breakthrough came from splitting the map into hundreds of small chunks, so the engine only has to draw the grass you can actually see. Blades in the distance gradually shrink to nothing before their chunk switches off entirely, creating a seamless fade that's invisible in practice. Shadows are disabled on grass (you'd never notice them from above), and we avoided any expensive transparency tricks that would slow things down.
What's Next
Smooth terrain transitions between biomes and a proper ocean are on the workbench -- coastlines are about to get a lot more interesting.