Yesterday I showed the first bridge in MMORPG Tycoon 2.  Today, I’m showing the first human-placed mountain range.  Under the new system, you can place big terrain features using almost exactly the same interface as is used to place roads.  Select the type of terrain you want, then draw a line showing where you want the terrain feature.  Like in the videos I showed before, this has live-updating, and it’s not final until you release the mouse button.

In this case, your terrain features are shown (in addition to being able to see the terrain) by spires, with slender cables connecting them.

My immediate feeling is that the spires are too thin, which makes them quite difficult to click on.  Same for the cables;  they’re difficult to click on, which makes it difficult to add extra spires on a single cable.  I’ll need to make the spires and cables a good deal thicker, I suspect.  But I do like this general approach;  it pushes the terrain back down into a reasonable memory footprint (even for massive WoW-scale maps), so I won’t feel like I’m monopolising people’s hard disk space when they go to save their game or anything.