Hi again!
I'm here to tell you a bit more about this new map system. I'm still working on that 2D system, improving it, so after it's fully finished (or almost) it's just to add a "Z" axis to be generated and it's 3D.
Colored textures
As you may know, on OLD the textures were rendered as they are, meaning that if they are red, it remains red.
With this new system I added the possibility to color the textures by code, meaning that a piece of grass can be green or brown, depending on a number of factors. Also this means that in a near future players might be able to color their own blocks using paint, not really important but still cool, isn't it?
Texture merging
What about merging some textures into one? For example minerals, worms, or stuff like that. As you know, OLD doesn't have this stuff yet, but now is possible!
Saving
If you play OLD right now you'll see that the whole map is being saved, and this is done also every few seconds.
With the new system only those pieces of terrain that were modified by the hand of the player (or events) will be saved, and only those that were saved will be loaded, this means a loading screen a lot faster and less space required for saving, unless that you modify a lot of pieces.
Under research
Lighting by color
This is something under research, but maybe I can add a illumination system able to dark areas that are under terrain (caves, buried buildings...).
Dynamic water
This is my nemesis, really hard to code, but with this new system this might be really easier than before. Now that every chunk and block have properties this is possible, but still hard to process for any system, no matter how powerful your computer is, so the main task will be to separate these threads (processing threads) from everything else in a queue.
As you see this new map system will bring a lot of new possibilities and features to the game, so it's very important to make it stable from the beggining!