Adding New Zones

I've been stuck for a while trying out various tools for implementing terrain from around the world over the past 6 weeks.  Mostly these take hours for a single attempt, so take days to repeat to try to fine tune.  This has been in an effort to improve the work flow better than what was used to bring in the original terrain for zone 0's English Channel.  In the end I've had to return to the original workflow. 

This makes it more difficult to plan out what terrain will end up in what zone, but it still is a relatively fast process (minutes instead of hours), is smaller in disk space than the other tools I tried by orders of magnitude, and still produces an acceptable resulting terrain. 

So now I'm pushing forward with generating all the zones that represent the British Isles, and have most of the code already written for transferring players between zones.  Over the next week I'll be tying this all together.   After that I will continue adding more zones to cover Europe all the way around Africa to India, and a lot of the surrounding relatively empty ocean.  I think this will put the territory of the game in a good place for really testing the long distance trade aspect of the game.  Even though the game will still only have a small fraction of the total planet covered, it will still feel like a very large and open world at that point. 

To recap on zones, the game world for various technical reasons is being split up across hundreds of separate server instances, each one is a zone server.  As players hit the edge of one zone they will be transferred to the next zone.  Zones take approximately 60 - 90 minutes to cross, depending on the size of the zone and the speed of the ship.  The British Isles for example will be covered by 4 separate zone servers.