Terrain That Erodes and a Sky That Changes

The maps in Wavefront: Vanguard have always been procedural, but until now they were noise with a shoreline. This week the generator learned some geology, the sky learned about the weather, and the whole game got louder.

Land shaped by water

The terrain is now run through an erosion simulation before anything is placed on it. Thermal erosion makes talus slopes, stream-power incision cuts branching river valleys with floodplains, and a per-vertex hardness field decides where rock beds terrace into plateaus and mesas, and where they break into real cliff lines with stepped walls and strata bands.

Rivers now grow like real ones. Narrow streams rise in the hills and feed the rivers, and every river widens as it goes: about 10 m at the source, 20 to 40 m by the time it has taken in its tributaries and flares into an estuary at the sea. Deeper channels and longer bridges follow. An armored bridge layer can span a stream or a young river, but the lower reaches need a real bridge. Where a river drops over a rock step there is now a waterfall, with white water, a plunge pool, mist and a roar you hear as the camera comes near.

Mountains come from a ridge graph: connected chains with spurs and passes, which the roads prefer. Ranges fade out toward the coast, and base sites avoid mountain flanks and pockets. The rocks vary with the land: granite tors on the hills, lone erratics in open lowland, scree on the cliffs, rockfall at their feet, hoodoos in the desert badlands, cobbles along rivers and dark rocks awash along the coast.

Vegetation follows the water. Land near rivers and lakes, and slopes facing the prevailing wind, is lush and wooded. The rain shadow behind a ridge is dry and open. Villages sit among striped farm fields and hedgerows, trees sway in the wind, cloud shadows drift across the land, and birds circle over the woods.

A sky worth looking at

The sky is now a procedural shader driven by the day/night cycle every frame: a vivid blue gradient, a sun disc with glow, a small moon, stars, a warm band on the sun side at dawn and dusk, and drifting clouds whose shadows match the ones on the ground.

Weather changes it. Overcast, rain and storms fill and grey the sky, a sandstorm turns it tan, fog hazes everything toward the horizon, and lightning lights the clouds from inside. The normal view is the only one that sees it: thermal, radar and night vision keep their own solid backgrounds, and night vision is hit hardest by haze because the intensifier amplifies the light the fog scatters.

You can also tilt the camera now, from almost flat to straight down, with Home and End or a vertical middle-drag.

The effects pass

Every particle effect was rebuilt. Smoke, dust and foam are lit by the sky and sun, eroded by 3D noise and depth-faded against the ground. Fire, sparks, flares and tracers are HDR and bloom. Explosions throw spark streaks and smoking debris, shimmer the air with heat, scorch the ground and shake the camera (with a strength slider, or off). Sinking ships leave bubbles and an oil slick. Ground vehicles lay track marks in sand, grass and snow that fade over 45 seconds and survive the vehicle that made them, and a hidden enemy lays none, nor a contrail or a dust plume, so effects no longer give away a unit before its mesh.

The Voronoi fracture that breaks walls and wrecks was fixed too. Pieces used to come out as needles because the cells were cut before the part's scale was applied. Now they're cut at real size, with more cells on long parts, and the debris reads as chunks and plate shards rather than rods.

Voices and languages

A staff announcer now reports on the radio: "We're under attack!", "Construction complete.", "Missile inbound!", "Enemy spotted.", victory or defeat. Your units answer when you select them and give orders. Every line has a few variants and its own cooldown, urgent reports cut in and the rest wait, and unit replies come through a radio filter. The lines were generated with ElevenLabs under a commercial licence, replacing the text-to-speech placeholders, and Settings > Audio > Voices sets the level.

The game is now in Spanish as well as English and French: all 19 text tables, 2,167 strings, auto-detected from Steam or the OS language. Spanish players hear the English voice lines until Spanish recordings exist.

Also

• The aircraft following order was verified: two fighters hold a follow on a lead fighter over a 1.7 km flight, and ships follow ships along the coast without thrashing against the beach.
• The terrain's grass and sand colours were saturated by 45%, which is the kind of number that barely shows until it's lit.
• Thermal view now offers white-hot, black-hot and ironbow palettes.

Next: what happens after the battle.