Housing

The house editor which I mentioned in Designing, optimizing and moving forward is coming along well and I have already added quite a few useful tools to it, there are a few missing features like the rules which the house should be created with.

After I've created the editor version I'm moving on to creating it for the game as well, after that I'll be focusing on greedy meshing.

Samuli also has almost finished the building GUI for the game and it looks awesome.

I've modified the biome editor slightly, we can now select which trees appear on different heights.

Before the end

I changed the orthographic camera to perspective as you can see in the above video, we decided to do this because the sense of depth was necessary and we might need to move the camera closer to the character in places like caves.

I also created multiple arrays of vertices/tris/normals/etc which will act as buffers for when I'm generating a mesh from chunks, this will reduce the amount of garbage that would have otherwise produced by the temporary mesh arrays, the only downside with these buffers is that they will use up a small amount of memory. Of course this could be avoided if I could just create a single buffer of each vertices/tris/etc and give it to unity's mesh class with a length parameter but I can't.

PS: Happy new year!

Designing, optimizing and moving forward

The new cube creator is finished for now, I will be adding more options and features to it later.

I haven't mentioned anything about greedy meshing and there's a good reason for that, you might have noticed that there are several different textures near each other making the greedy meshing very small and not all that useful, the other problem is that I have all of the textures in one atlas so repeating a certain texture would be problematic because you can't overflow the uv coordinates in an atlas so that the texture would repeat, so I had to created a shader which could repeat a texture inside an atlas by adding a certain amount, let's say 512, to the uv coordinates which would tell the shader how many times the texture would repeat, after that it would be just a few calculations to determine the current texture index by just dividing the uv by 512 after which we can get the actual uv coordinates for the certain part in the mesh.

While we can now repeat a certain texture it still does not remove the problem that we have multiple textures near each other, for that I would just need to create a new atlas and combine textures in a 2 * 2 texture in every possible combination so I can create 2 * 2 * 2 size cubes with one texture that has 4 different texture combinations for each side instead of 1 * 1 * 1 with one texture for each side.

There might be better ways to do this but I can't dwell for too long in optimizing the terrain generator or it might become a never ending project.

Me and Samuli have been designing crafting for the game and an interface for it and it looks great.

A mockup of the crafting interface.

I've also been creating a house editor for the game, we are going to make preset assets for NPCs, players can create custom houses in the game but they can also use presets as well. A house will be created in 3 different stages, first a player will place walls for the house after which he can place the floor or the roof or even more layers, after the house is designed players can predetermine what furniture the house will have before building it.

Terrain facelift in progress part 2

I've almost finished the new cube creator, only a few features are missing from the biome editor, but already we have made some very interesting and good looking terrains.

As you can see in the above image, we can edit the size and heights as well as what cubes will be generated to different heights, I also got the sub-biomes working.

Above image is a sub-biome of grasslands.

Desert biome and its sub-biome

Samuli also finished a new version of the 3D character model which is in the game already

We are continuing on adding more biomes and I'm leaning towards working on the gameplay mechanics.

Terrain facelift in progress

I've been recreating the cube creator as it lacked some features and it occasionally gave unity some problems as it started reporting errors of null objects being synchronized or something along those lines, anyway the new unfinished cube creator will make the map generation so much more flexible as the new features to the biomes and the new sub-biomes will allow broader range of options to the map generator, with it I can generate much more realistic and unique terrain.

As I mentioned sub-biomes adding them will require a new map, like the temperature and humidity maps, the new map will have numbers going from 0 to 100, so depending what range the sub-biomes will have, it will affect which sub or parent biome will be selected.

I mentioned in the previous post that I optimized the generation of the heightmap, thanks to that optimization and the lake algorithm I was able to sped up the isometric image rendering which I can now use in the cube creator to view different landscapes faster.

I also finally added the 3D model of the character to the game as well as tree felling.

Me and Samuli been talking and designing quests for the game, nothing big just some examples, we want to have dynamic quests that are build from multiple different quest pieces, we've also been trying to make the quests so that there are multiple ways to complete an objective, the player can decide how he would complete said objective, we would only give a possible direction from which the player could complete the objective.

Seemingly impossible lake part 2

I ran to a problem with the lake algorithm, as I create it by using a heightmap and the problem with this was that holes in the ground will not be filled, of course I though that just creating a floor under the lake and walls at the border will fix this but there was one special case to which this "fix" did not work very well, here's a picture

As you can see there is a huge hole here and the reason for this is that above there is a cliff which makes it the highest elevation in the heightmap which in turn makes this side of the mountain not being filled, thankfully fixing this was quite simple and effective but it does not follow the wall perfectly as it will convert some blocks to water making the wall a little more linear.

Other than this problem, I've optimized the lake generation as well as the creation of heightmap.

Oh and I did try to do something about the rendering of chunks as the useless garbage allocation is insane, but the mesh creation in unity blows and I can't actually prevent useless garbage allocations, but I did make it a little faster and use less memory

Seemingly impossible lake

I've finished adding water to the game sort of, I can generate lakes and render them but there are no "fluid simulation" happening, yet, and there are still a lot of things that I have to think through before I can officially say it's finished.

So how did I add water to the game, it was actually quite difficult as the terrain is easy to shape but adding something like liquid is harder as it can spill, overflow and so on, so what I first did was
I created a heightmap from the coarse noise map from which I searched spots where a single water could be placed without spilling, after I had done that I made a sort of a filling algorithm that would raise water to nearby neighbors until a x number of nodes were found, then I remove all nodes that have neighbors (except ones that have been found) that are lower in height than the highest node that was found, now I had possible lakes that could be formed but there was another step I had to do.

Left has water locations, middle one lakes and right is the heightmap.

Next up I created a heightmap from the finer noise map, now that I had all the lakes from previously, I go through all of the lakes and find the lowest point of each lake and I locate them in the finer noise map from which again use a filling algorithm, this algorithm is essentially a better version that I used to find the lakes. The result does not fully represent the lake that was found from the coarse map as the finer noise is modified slightly to add slight differences to the terrain.

I can't create all the lakes in one go as it takes quite a bit of resources and space from the harddrive but thanks to the coarse map I have all the potential lakes from which I can actually generate them from.

Below is a gif of a lake, not the same one as in the heightmap.

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