Devlog - October 16th 2022

Environment generation & town placement algorithm

This week’s focus was exclusively on the integration of the MicroVerse asset for the world generation. After a bit more planning and testing at the beginning of the week I shortly after was able to start coding the new world generation algorithm utilizing the speed and efficiency of MicroVerse. So far I’ve implemented the creation of mountain ranges at the edges of the game world and random mountain and hills placement within the game world. I decided to no longer make the environment generation based on chunks (other systems will still use chunks) as it’s not really required anymore with the speed that MicroVerse provides. For example generating a 10x10km terrain with mountains and complete texturing takes not even 2 seconds currently. The chunk approach was originally used to support infinite terrains and provide good performance while generating parts of the world on the fly. With the new generation speed and a fixed game world size I can instead generate the entire world during the loading sequence. Since I would like to implement the full pipeline for the world generation before making sure all looks great I decided that the results so far are sufficient to shift focus on the next part in the pipeline: Town & POI placements. At first I tried using an asset for the evaluation of valid points for the placement of towns and other points of interest but quickly decided that this system takes way too long for the evaluation process. Instead I wrote a very simple but effective world scanner system myself which does provide sufficiently good results within a very short timeframe. On Friday I had to devote some time to boring management tasks and also have to do more tomorrow. After that is done I will start with the implementation of roads to connect the placeholder town cubes. Depending on how quickly that goes I might also be looking into vegetation placements later during the week. I am currently aiming for another tech demo for the end of October. That demo will only feature a fly camera to allow interested testers to quickly navigate the world and provide feedback on the speed and quality of the world generation so far.

Notable tasks this week:

• Integrated new terrain (+texturing) generation based on MicroVerse asset
• Implemented POI placement evaluation algorithm

Wishlist on Steam

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That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well. Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.