Creating shareable terrains

Imagine you’re building a 3D tactics game where players explore different locations made of randomized terrain tiles. Each tile may be water (which you can’t walk on), ground (which you can), grass (which may contain ninjas), or edges (which keep you boxed in). When you start building your terrain-generating scripts, everything is fine because you’re only testing with a 10x10 grid with a maximum of 100 tiles (no big deal with today’s hardware). However, during playtesting, you find your players wanting bigger and bigger areas to explore, eventually leading you to consider creating entire tiled worlds. What’s more, you may want to create more than three types of tiles (I know I’d like there to be more variety when I’m walking around a game world), making tile management and performance an even bigger issue.

What are your options when performance optimizations and hardware limitations are in the mix? Can...