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I previously blogged about how I’m modelling and rendering water waves in the game, but that was in the previous incarnation on a sphere. I’ve finally ported that over to the current version, and made some considerable improvements along the way. People told me it looks good, and I tend to agree. Let’s dive in!
Exactly one year ago this Valentine’s Day, I started development on Around The World. Let’s look back on the past, but more importantly, look forward at what’s still ahead.
Even though the in-game world is fairly small compared to Earth, I want it to feel big. Part of that is being able to see things that are far away.
In the previous post, I determined what kind of vegetation should grow where in my procedurally generated world. Now it’s time to actually plant those plants!
I should be working on gameplay, but I got tired of looking at drab grey terrain, so I decided to beautify it first by adding some vegetation. In a way, this is in line with my plan to add a solid technical foundation for the game before stacking too much gameplay on top, because I’m not sure that the hardware will be able to render all those trees in a huge open world.
In the previous post, I promised to start placing some ports in our procedurally generated world. That turned out to be a bit more work than I expected.
Now that we have a plausible looking height map for the entire world, it’s time to zoom in and see what the terrain looks like up close.
As I mentioned last time, I’m currently working on a full rewrite of the game, with a focus on building a solid technical foundation first. But because much of that is boring work, I allowed myself a fun side quest: hydraulic erosion.
I’ve done something that common wisdom in software development says you should never ever do: I started over. Let me explain why. This might get a bit technical…
In a game focused on exploration, we need to have a way to decide what the player can and cannot see. With a first-person or third-person 3D view, visibility comes for free: anything below the horizon, and anything behind something else, is not visible. With a top-down perspective, we need to do some more work.