Who's ever heard of an ExaByte?

I got to thinking the other day that the map size limit - which is 32k×32k pixels in the current release - was just a little bit too low. Sooner or later, I though, someone might want something bigger. So, I've upgraded the mosaic map system to use a 64-bit indexing variable, and the new size limit is 2Gpxl×2Gpxl, or 4.6×10¹⁸ pixels - it's so stupendously large I had to Google for the prefix.

However, some sanity has prevailed. I've coded-in a practical limit at around 4 terapixels to prevent the mosaic state table from getting too big. Four trillion pixels per map is still a lot of bits, mind you. Anyhow, since I don't have a couple of terabytes at my disposal right now, it's kind of hard to actually verify this new size limit. I have made a 128k×64k texture, which at 8 billion pixels was enough to prove that the old limit no longer applies. It's not the same thing, but heh.

The bad news is that I'm not planning to increase the allowed height map size from 32k×32k until L3DT 2.4. In the next release, these new extra-big mosaics will only apply to the texture map, which will get a maximum size limit of 512k×512k (256 gigapixels). This is to allow 16× high-res textures for all height map sizes.