Sectional terrain editing

A method for sectional terrain editing comprising:

• maintaining a plurality of terrain data collections associated with a plurality of terrain sections for terrain of at least part of a virtual area associated with a content item, each of the plurality of terrain sections having at least one associated terrain data collection of the plurality of terrain data collections;
• checking out, to a first user, a first terrain data collection of the plurality of terrain data collections associated with a first terrain section of the plurality of terrain sections for editing terrain of the first terrain section;
• checking in, from the first user, the first terrain data collection;
• and
• saving, to the first data collection, data corresponding to one or more edits associated with the first data collection made by the first user during a time that the first data collection is checked out to the first user,
• wherein, during at least part of the time that the first terrain data collection is checked out to the first user, a second terrain data collection of the plurality of terrain data collections associated with a second terrain section of the plurality of terrain sections is made available to be checked out to a second user.

One or more non-transitory computer-readable storage media having stored thereon instructions that, upon execution by one or more computing devices, cause the one or more compute nodes to perform operations comprising:

• maintaining a plurality of terrain data collections associated with a plurality of terrain sections for terrain of at least part of a virtual area associated with a content item, wherein a first terrain section of the plurality of terrain sections has an associated first group of terrain data collections of the plurality of terrain data collections;
• checking out, to a first user, a first terrain data collection of the first group of terrain data collections associated with the first terrain section for editing terrain of the first terrain section;
• checking in, from the first user, the first terrain data collection;
• and
• saving, to the first data collection, data corresponding to one or more edits associated with the first data collection made by the first user during a time that the first data collection is checked out to the first user,
• wherein, during at least part of the time that the first terrain data collection is checked out to the first user, a second terrain data collection of the first group of terrain data collections associated with the first terrain section is made available to be checked out to a second user.