Endless Powder streams an infinite ski mountain with a bounded 64 MiB working set
sterlingcrispin · x · 2026-10-22
The developer of Endless Powder explains how the game streams an endless procedurally generated mountain within a bounded working set:
- Predictive streaming: terrain tiles ahead of the rider's actual travel vector are queued up while old tiles retire and caches evict — movement never waits for rendering or mesh preparation.
- Three spatial budgets: 64 m tiles for visible geometry, 16 m regions retaining GPU baseline packets in an 8x8 window, and a 36 m interactive snow field computed per-cell around the player rather than across the whole surface.
- Multi-resolution triangles: the same 64x64 m tile runs 2,414 triangles in the background, 3,048 as the canonical contact surface, and 100k for interactive draw detail underfoot.
- Adaptive scaling: the game measures performance and both the game and terrain system scale patch sizes and resolution to hold frame rate.
- Halfpipes range from mid-sized to half-mile-long; landing tricks grants speed boosts, but halfpipes taper rewards to prevent point farming.
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