Planet maps now have 40,000 hexes

One of our recent small victories. I already wrote that we now render planets up close with unique surfaces, and that each hex on a planet's surface opens into a large map. But there was a catch. A planet could have at most about 10,000 hexes. We couldn't go higher because the geometric algorithms used for preliminary calculations would hit a hard limit. That size did give us quite workable dimensions for a single hex on which buildings and other things could be placed: roughly 260 meters across. But I wanted more detail. And now I've managed it: 40,000 hexes. The map scale is now 130 meters for Earth and, accordingly, 100–150 meters for Earth-like planets. The 10,000-hex version will be used for Mars-sized planets, keeping the scale roughly the same. We won't go to 160,000 hexes. The hardware could handle it, but the database would become enormous. Although it isn't out of the question if we grow: 10–20 terabytes.