Today I squashed an old bug… I had a cave planet whose generation ended up being this: So the player couldn’t get out of the initial drop zone! I have a lot of code to try to prevent this sort of thing, but sometimes some stuff falls through the cracks… That’s actually one of the […]
The results weren’t as good as I hoped, but at least they’re fully procedural and there’s not many idiot names in the lists… I tried using a syllable-based system, but there are just too many of those, so the memory required for this algorithm would be just too much! Ended up using a list of […]
Still working on the random name generation, not 100% happy with the results… So far, the system with best quality is based on probability. I give the system a list of “good names”, and he builds a dictionary of probabilities, which describe the probability of character Z to come after character Y, after character X. […]
Yep, this week has been very original… I’m closer and closer, and the latest addition to the algorithms has really made a difference… After all the process is done, I now do a linear interpolation between the height of the river/lake and the surroundings, making it rise smoothly enough so that the water doesn’t escape! […]
I’ve studied a bit more on A* optimization, and I finally found what the major problem is… The fact that I’m really putting an extremely large penalty on any “rising” terrain means that the system has to search the whole map to find a valid path… Playing around with the factors, I massively reduced the […]
Most of what I’ve done today got thrown away… That’s a sad thing that sometimes happens in development… I did a lot of experiments with the lake generation code, and I finally found something that I think actually works, by playing around with the parameterization of the algorithm… Since this whole process is taking about […]
This is taking much longer than I wanted… Although I’m closer (and just found out I’m doing a lake every 4 cells), it’s still not good enough, the water doesn’t follow enough: The brightest points are the lake spawn points, but the water dies down too fast… I could do more iterations, but this takes […]
The results still aren’t looking good… The current algorithm is to fill a cell with a large value and then apply a kind of blur filter on the map, being selective on the heights (so we don’t use the value from low terrain to change higher cells). The problem is that there seems to be […]
Started work on the new river system… The current rivers are just a line lowering the terrain and replacing the voxel material: It has a lot of bugs (floating rivers, but that could be sorted), but it’s impossible to animate (especially because it doesn’t have an actual direction) and it doesn’t actually look like a […]
Well, some people came me to me and asked me how I was generating the procedural bases, so I decided to put this up to explain my ideas… Note that this isn’t ground-breaking stuff! I’m using it to build the pirate lairs (and space bases, etc), but it can be applied to any kind of […]