Devlog - November 6th 2022

Improved world generation & fog

This week’s focus was on getting closer to the next tech demo. I started the week by getting more experienced with Unity’s new UI system called UI Toolkit by starting the work on the generation settings menu. The beginnings were slow but the more I got used to the new workflow and the systems design philosophy the better I was able to create the UI the way I wanted it. I’m keeping this menu as simple as possible as it is only a temporary one used for practicing and won’t be used beyond the upcoming tech demos centered around the world generation part of the game. After a basic menu was in place I moved on to further improve the world generation result by adding more surface features such as smaller hills. This implementation went smooth and quick and really elevated the result of the world generation. So far I was using actual amounts of mountains or towns placed but decided that’s not really a good idea for players to do as this could easily lead to impossible worlds if the player chose combinations that don’t make sense together. For example setting the mountains and towns to numbers so high that the algorithm for town placement evaluation can’t find any spots for towns the world would end up being unplayable. To avoid these scenarios I replaced actual numbers with options like few or many mountains. That way I can handle the amount internally based on the world size and options chosen. I added those options for mountains, surface roughness like hills and towns. With those in place any combination of the three will now result in a playable map. As render distances are vastly longer than before I also spent a little bit of time experimenting with distance fog.I also added a very basic first person camera so testers will be able to switch between a fly camera and a first person camera to get a better feeling of scale. Next week I will be adding those to the options menu alongside a few other missing settings. I hope to be able to provide the next tech demo by the end of next week to interested testers. If you are interested in checking out that demo please reach out to me via direct message. After this upcoming tech demo I will be moving its code back into the main project which will allow me to use a proper lightning setup and post processing which is something that will be missing for the first tech demo.

Notable tasks this week:

• Added basic generation options menu
• More UI Toolkit learning (Unity’s new UI system)
• Added surface roughness (hills) to the generation
• Added other demo relevant features like a first person camera and fog

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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.