Update: Faster 3D Engine, Better World Generator, Game Play
Hey guys, I increased the speed of the 3D engine. Now a much more detailed landscape is possible:
I also updated the world generator:
Just for fun I added an ocean:
And I connected all caves with each other! The world generation speed is now 5 times faster!
Note that in order to see the higher view range you need to increase the "View Distance" in the game settings.
Along with this I added a lot of bug fixes regarding the trees, player movement, GUI, plants, textures and so on.
The new version is in the unstable branch.
Trees, Buildings, Editor and Engine
Hello and welcome back,
before we start with the development update, I want to wish you all a good health. These are hard times during the Coronavirus crisis. I hope we all get better soon.
Assets
In the last weeks I had the flu, so I had a lot of time to create new assets:
New houses for the city generator: Till now I used random generated houses. This looked not very good, so I started to make hand made buildings. Along with the exterior, all these buildings have furniture and waypoints for the NPCs
Forests: I created 5 new tree types and made the forests more dense. This is possible because of the new tree rendering system.
I created over hundred new models that can be used in the game. I created furniture for the kitchen, food, city elements, windows, doors. Just for fun I also created adventure game assets.
I also updated the engine:
The low end rendering engine is now a high performance forward rendering system, with bump mapping, radiosity and so on. Now I only need to create lightmaps during runtime and then I can use the new renderer. This will greatly improve the performance. Faster shadow rendering: I created a new shadow rendering system:
Improved tree rendering: I found some bugs in the renderer that prevent the correct rendering of the trees.
Far Rendering: The quality of the far rendering is also improved. I found some bugs in the lod system.
LOD rendering for trees: Trees are now automatically rendered to textures when they are far away. Then only the textures are displayed.
World generation: I changed the world generator to create more flat terrain. This is necessary so that there is more space to place buildings.
The editor was also improved:
Instanced Meshes (voxel and normal): This can be used to speed up the creation of maps for the game.
A lot of bug fixes and improved usability.
The editor now can use to created games.
And the biggest thing: I have finally found a solution to the city generator problem. I think it is pretty cool. But I do not want to tease it now :-)
When I am finished with bug fixing I will upload a new version!
Tweet: First village generated by the AI
Yes! The first village generated by the AI!
This is only a debug view. When it is finished these buildings will actually be placed in the landscape!
We will improve the performance in the next weeks so that we can create bigger cities. And we are testing other AI algorithms.
Uploaded a new version to the unstable branch
Hey, I just uploaded a new version to the unstable build with the new trees. You need to create a new map with the generator to see them (so do not use the predefined map with the seed 0).
Be aware: This is only a testing release. It could be that a map create with this version can't be loaded in a later version.
Tweet: AI and Forests
Now most of the visual bugs in the trees are resolved:
I will upload an unstable release as soon as possible.
And I implemented several AI algorithms that will drive the city generation:
- A* Planning - Alpha-Beta Adversary Search - Monte Carlo Tree Search
Except for the first one these algorithms are normally used in Chess AI / Go. I am excited to see how they work out.
The first tests will be on a small landscape of several hundred meters.
Tweet: Trees in the game
First screenshot of the new trees in the game!
There is still much to do. The trees currently create holes in the ground and some trees do not have leafs.
Tweet: New trees are now generated by the world generator
The new trees are now connected to the world generator. So exited to see them in the world! When they are cut down they will collapse to the ground and fall into pieces.
Tweet: Castle Generator and Happy New Year
The basic castle generator is now working. Every castle has it's own dungeon.
Happy new year!
The AI language compiler (C to PDDL) is finished and the shadow rendering for the low end render system makes progress.
Tweet: Porting to other platforms
I threw away a lot of dependency in order to port the game to other platforms like android, ps4, ... Now only Bullet, OpenGL, SDL2 and a C++ compiler is needed to compile the game.
Castle Generator and Uber Shader
So I finally found the place where the castle generator puts the castles! And added an Uber Shader to the rendering system!
The castle still needs a little bit calibration :-)
