Snow is most of what you look at in Arctic Drive, so it deserved our attention, now that we prepare for the next beta phases. We replaced the whole thing with our own system. We call it PurrSnow , and it's running behind the scenes for testing now.
What changed
The snow is a real surface now, and everything interacts with it:
Wheels carve actual trenches. Boots leave footprints. Dropped items land in their own craters.
The same wheel prints a tire track when it's on the truck, and a flat circle when it's lying in a ditch. The snow reads the real shape of things.
Tracks can fill back in while it's snowing (not implemented, but possible)
Drifts blow onto the roads. You can drive through them.
Nights got a proper moonlit sheen across the snow.
Why build it ourselves
The old snow was a closed box. This one is ours giving us more control. The game can ask how deep the snow is at any spot. That opens the door for deeper driving physics and weather that actually buries the world. Snow depth is dynamic. Blizzards that pile up the roads over time are a setting now, not a rewrite. It's built for our infinite world from day one.
Performance
The whole simulation runs on the GPU in a window around you. One footprint or an hour of donuts, same price. No tessellation, no extra render passes, about a dozen MB of memory. It looks better than the old snow and runs faster.
What's next
Open beta is the next milestone, and the snow will keep getting attention until then while being tested. If you've been in the closed beta, thank you so much for helping us out!
A huge part of this game is coming together, thanks to you.