That's right! We are currently reworking our evolution system to tie in with Unreal's built in foliage system. This will allow us to make worlds as big as we want!
So yeah! Pretty cool. That's where I've been if your wondering where the updates were.
Originally each piece of foliage was its own object (This is slow because nothing is instanced on the GPU) by putting all of one type of tree together as one and then copying it around is waaaayyyy faster.
Why didn't we do this originally? When we came up with the idea the game wasn't supposed to be set in larger worlds. However, based on some things we want to add in the future, and the fact that what we have now will be many times better in a larger world, we have decided to integrate foliage into the instancing system. Yes this will take a while. Also there are a few trade offs, for example, the entire foliage area in many ways will all look the same and you won't be able to see how it evolved from the "older" versions. The entirety of one plant species will have the same statistics (We can still make them look different from each other like we used to though). We can still have them become an entirely separate instancing set once they become different enough. I think this is a fair trade off because of the capability of large worlds, and we can still divide the same species up into different species a fair amount.
What's left? Well we need to still finish the functionality of the new plants, we also still need to figure out a way for thousands of animals to exist at the same time without the game becoming a slide show (The plan is for animals to go into "stasis" when far away) and the animals will need to be updated to target the new plants.
That's all, thanks for reading,
-DrierWhisper 729