Quote: "It's great to see that your still very busy with this long-term project! Keep up the awesome work!"
Thanks!
Quote: "Did you think about being able to position entire terrain tiles / meta terrains in your world space? That would free you from your grid layout, so you could have empty spaces between terrain tiles at no performance cost. You could then use these empty spaces for long sea travels or something. Just an idea..."
Yeah, that's actually built into the LOD system for the terrains. If no terrain segments in a meta terrain have been edited, then the meta terrain remains a single plain. When you click on the terrain to edit it, the meta terrain you click on splits into 10x10 terrain segments (of size 1x1) that make up the meta terrain, and the specific terrain segment splits into a 64x64 terrain.
You can actually see all three levels in the above screenshots. The 4 terrain segments that the island crosses is textured, but then the other 96 terrain segments that make up that meta terrain are just a 1x1 plain (randomly colored for now, will be just a default texture eventually). Then you can see the 24 meta terrains that have not been edited are still just a single plain. Also, something you can't really see in the screenshots is that when you get a certain distance from a terrain it switches to a 16x16 grid that represents the 64x64 grid.
So all of this automatic LOD switching means that I can have a big world with a decent framerate.
EDIT: Just reread and saw that you seem to be talking about actually repositioning meta terrains. That is a good idea to consider as a future option, but I see a problem with it. At the moment the terrain editor is made so you can edit across meta-terrains. In other words, an island does not have to be confined to one meta terrain.