Terminology and Method: Chunk Texture Maps for Terrain?

Procedurally generated worlds like Minecraft and 7 Days to Die use chunk maps cached to the hard drive to dynamically load the world as the player explores it. Is there a similar method for textures that would function similarly? Here's possible applications:

• Recreate Journey's rolling sandscape
• Store painted bump maps for persistent footprints and trails in mud, sand, and snow for non-voxel terrain

Is this a thing? What's it called, and how is it commonly approached?

 

Asset bundles? I suggest looking at them in the Unity documents. This is more implementation than design.

 

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AssetBundlesIntro.html

By definition described, that's not it.

 

Wrong forum, this has nothing to do with gamedesign.

There is a GDC talk somewhere about how they did footprints in snow for a Batman game, Arkham Origins iirc.

"Texture streaming" as a search query might also give you some interesting results.

 

You might also take inspiration from megatexture (or sparse virtual texture)