How it got here

Every island broke a different part of the pipeline from survey data to drivable ground: scale, streaming, coastlines, textures. Hachijō came back in September with far better tools than it had in July.

Roads are easy until two of them meet. Junctions, cambers, driveways and the terrain underneath are where every approach broke. The two August experiments were never going to replace the network. Their best ideas went back into it.

Six models, and it ended up back where it started, with a brush. Each one fixed the last one’s most obvious problem and uncovered a subtler one. Two ideas survived everything: braking and cornering share one grip budget, and the grip peak should come out of the physics rather than a fitted curve.

A simulated steering rack sounds like the proper answer. But a rack the tyres can push can also shake itself. Splitting the angle from the feel made both of them simpler, and both got better.

The first helicopter was a prop for a shooter, and it aimed at the mouse cursor. It flew on fake forces for eight months, and then got rebuilt from the parts a real one has in a single week.

Full soft-body simulation is spectacular and expensive. One got built to see what it would take, stayed in a test bed as a reference, and its lessons went into a cheaper model that every car can afford.

It looks like one number in a settings file. It was changed on purpose three times and lost by accident once, and for two months nobody noticed, because the cars still drove.

Every piece of the port had to reproduce the original bit for bit before it was allowed to drive anything. That made it slow to build, but it means the port changes nothing you can feel.

The first cloud system was built and never placed in a scene. The second one starts from a multiplayer question, how two players get to see the same sky, and works outwards from there.