Nowadays games include mostly indoor locations. If there are any outdoor locations present, they are usually limited to small clearings between high mountains with a little bit of the sky above them. The Chrome Engine enables the player to run around a very deep forest looking at very detailed textures of the leaves and the bark. The very next moment the player might be jumping into a shuttle and rising high above the ground to see everything turn smaller and smaller, until it becomes an extensive view of the whole terrain covered with thousands of little trees.

All this is possible thanks to innovative algorithms used to produce extensive terrains with numerous objects. The environment is presented as a map indicating terrain elevation. That system has certain limitations, but these can always be avoided by simply placing 3D objects on the terrain. The combination of polygon algorithms needed for terrain visualization at a given view with innovative methods of sending these to video cards enabled very quick rendering of such terrain, regardless of the viewing point whether you re crawling on the ground or watching the ground from the bird s eye view.

Efficient methods of storing and rendering objects constituting the plant life in the game are also very important. In Chrome you can come across levels with the plant life count going into millions of separate pieces. Smooth running of the game could have been reached only with a proper selection system deciding which plants currently in view should be displayed. The basic problem was to choose such object selection methods, that would make the player unaware of the fact that certain objects are not displayed. The player s impression is the most important issue in that matter.

Chrome uses a very interesting system of storing information about millions of plants. This information concerns the density of certain plant types in certain locations. The appropriate real time algorithm can generate the list of plants, which are supposed to be displayed in a given view. This method allows a very efficient use of the RAM, because information about millions of objects would take a lot of memory.