First of all, another round of fixes for the road, bridge and river placement. Same deal as last month - don’t expect it to be perfect, but expect to see a lot less weird shit going on. Paths are now wider and use a different texture to make them a bit more noticeable. Bridges are less clunky and modify the terrain around them to make everything fit a bit better. Rivers are only placed if they exceed a certain length, meaning you’ll no longer see river sources right next to lakes, and various cases where the river mesh could overlap either itself or other meshes have been fixed. I also increased the tessellation of the river meshes in order to get a nicer and more natural water flow and their color now looks less neon.
Radtown and monument position finding has improved a great deal. The way it used to work was that they guessed a position that might make sense, checked the surrounding terrain, and either accept or reject that position for placement. This led to a lot of possible placement options being discarded, and some maps missing the bigger rad towns because they failed to find a suitable spot, even though there might have been one. The terrain anchoring system now looks for the perfect placement altitude in every attempt, which means it guarantees that no potential fits are missed. It might still fail to find suitable spots on smaller maps, but that’s somewhat by design. In addition to that all, dynamic decor adjustments are now modular so that artists can easily tweak a lot of decor parameters in a way that makes sense to them. This won’t affect anything immediately, but it means we’ll have an easier time moving things from concept scenes to the real deal.
Landscape-wise, this month brought some nice improvements to the base landmass shape and water body shape. I also added more details to plains and improved the shapes of both mountains and hills. In more exciting news, I bothered Petur to send me a first prototype of a prefab mountain and implemented a system that places that mountain on the procedural terrain. This means that artists are now able to design landscape features by hand, which are then smoothly fitted into the procedural world. Generally speaking, this process yields a higher visual quality than purely procedurally generated worlds since things like hydraulic erosion can be simulated on a mountain, which can take a couple of minutes to calculate and is therefore too slow to do when loading the level. All of this is barely more than a proof of concept to test the functionality, but expect to see mountains that look as bad-ass as those in the upcoming custom map in the near to middle future.
I also decided to run a proper ocean vs. lake analysis when generating bodies of waters. This means no more lighthouses in lakes and all players are guaranteed to properly spawn at the coastline. It also means that from now on we can separate whether or not you’re swimming in salt-water and whether or not the water you’re trying to drink will save you or kill you. If the functionality to drink water is implemented, that is.
On the asset side of things I added proper cliffs, micro cliffs, and overhangs to the procedural map. Cliffs are placed wherever the terrain falls off very steeply. Micro cliffs are added to fields and hillsides that fall off slightly, and overhangs can mostly be observed on beaches. During that process I added the improved rock assets Petur and Bill have created a few weeks ago. I also increased the number of rock clusters and improved the way they are placed and added Diogo’s new terrain blending. Grass and décor vegetation can now grow on top of some of the rocks, and a new material parameter system allows us to tweak shader properties on every individual rock. Say goodbye to the three static rock colors and instead enjoy smooth colour transitions based on the biome the rock is in. There’s also consistently high texture resolutions no matter how big we scale the rocks.
Talking of textures, Diogo and I also replaced the old terrain colour map with a set of 4 colours per texture--one for each biome--allowing us to get a lot more out of the terrain textures while preserving much nicer texture transitions. During this I updated the procedural map to the new colour and texture palette Petur has been working on for the Legacy level, so expect a vastly different look & feel on the entire terrain. Petur and Dan also did a new set of decor clutter assets that have now been added to forests, grasslands and beaches.
Forests got a lot bigger and, in combination with the new decor clutter and rocks, look quite a bit nicer than before. That being said, the trees themselves still need another pass, which will hopefully happen in the near future. Other resource changes include the addition of trees to roadsides and crystals in the snow biome. Crystals drop ores for now, but there are vague plans for a new resource type.
We can do nice galleries on the site, now. So there's nothing stopping us from dumping a whole load of beautiful screenshots. Look.
Seriously.