Development covered 9 Aug 2026 to 11 Aug 2026 (commit dates).
The world map in Myriad Immortal Sect is made of hand drawn pieces: halls, pines, herbs, beasts, mountain ranges, people. They were drawn at whatever size suited the drawing. A pine came in enormous. A herb came in nearly as tall as a person. A wild beast was being shown at one fixed height whether it was a rat or a tiger.
You do not notice this as a sizing problem. You notice it as the world feeling wrong, which is a much harder thing to act on.
The player is the ruler
The fix started by naming the unit. The player figure is the reference height for every drawn thing in the world, and whatever decides how large to render a piece asks a single place for that answer. A gatherable herb is about half a person. A pine is a tree, meaning several people tall. A beast is sized by what it is, and when the beast happens to be a person, it is sized like a person.
Having one answer sounds like tidiness. It is really about the failure it prevents. Three separate places were deciding size, and they had drifted, so the same object could be one height in the world and another in a panel. There is now a test whose only job is to fail if a fourth place starts deciding this on its own. The halls that rule now sizes are catalogued in the codex of buildings, each drawn against the same human ruler.
A ceiling flattens the thing you care about
My first version capped drawn height. Anything above the cap became the cap.
That is wrong in a way that took a day to see. A cap does not just shrink the giants. It makes all the giants the same. A mountain range, a great hall and an overgrown pine all hit the ceiling and arrive at identical height, so the world loses its ordering exactly where the ordering is most dramatic. The player cannot tell that the mountain is the biggest thing on screen, because everything tall is now equally tall.
So oversized things are compressed along a curve instead. Big things get noticeably smaller, enormous things get much smaller, and the ordering between them survives the squeeze. A mountain range is also allowed out of the system entirely, because a skyline that respects a height budget is not a skyline.
The bugs this class of change produces
Two are worth repeating because they are the same mistake wearing different clothes.
A gentle breathing animation on standing figures was written as a scale, so it multiplied whatever size the new system had chosen and pushed some villagers to twice the player's height on the inhale. An animation that adjusts a value has to adjust it, not replace it.
The ground had a similar story. I wanted a hairline seam between tiles so the surface reads as tiles rather than as paint, and I first added it by shrinking each tile. That opens gaps you can walk into, and in one spot could not walk out of. The seam belongs in the spacing between tiles, not in the tiles. You can judge the result in any stretch of wilderness, for example around the Dragon Vein Eye.
Walking got the same treatment
Click to move used to plan one route to the destination and give up if the whole thing was blocked. It now plans leg by leg, measures progress against the current leg instead of the final goal, and slides along a wall it bumps into while keeping the heading it was travelling on. It cancels only when the destination itself is unreachable, not when some point along the way is.
The common thread across all of it: the first version of each rule was a single global answer, and the world is not uniform enough for a single global answer. What worked was a rule that keeps relative order intact, plus one place that owns it, plus a test that notices when a second place appears.
Sizes now follow the player everywhere. Walk that continent free in the browser, or see the other devlogs on Idle Cultivation Game.
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