A world in Buildy can be hundreds of square miles. It’s impractical to expect people to pan around endlessly to see everything there is to see in a large world, and a zoomed out view would be cool to look at. Therefore, we’d like to let you zoom out far enough to see the world from much “higher up,” as it were. But it’s not as easy as just making everything smaller. Our rendering engine draws each object individually. If you’re looking at a large world, that’s hundreds of thousands of objects! We decided to use a Google Maps-style solution – we render square pieces of the world as images and stitch the images together in the web browser as the player scrolls around. In this post, we’ll explain the combination of technologies we use to render and display enormous zoomed out world views.
(If you’re interested, you can read another of our recent posts about our experiences with the influx of 1,000 builders from Hacker News. It’s got a list of future blog post ideas for you to comment on.)
