T w e n t y S i d e d

My project. Looking nice enough so far. But it has a problem. The problem is this:

Those are triangles.

A LOT of triangles.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Frontier #5: Stitching Time”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

As I said at the start of the project, I’m not aiming for realism. I’m looking for whimsical, retro, and fantastic. My goal is to have something interesting, as opposed to something realistic.

I mentioned before the detail layer of the terrain. It adds the continuous rolling hills across the world. These hills are irregular, but for the sake of illustration let’s imagine they are perfect sine waves:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Frontier #4: Dr. Seuss, Geologist”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I mentioned earlier that the program is comprised of a bunch of different systems. There are three systems we’re interested in right now:

1. Regions are abstract areas that have certain properties. Like, “stuff within these boundaries should be very hilly, moderately high, have bright green grass, etc”. It doesn’t contain any elevation or polygon data. It’s just an area of rules.
2. Pages are blocks of elevation data. Right now, these are generated in one go. When a given page is requested, the program drops what it’s doing and generates it. This takes a while, leading to really annoying quarter-second lockups as you move around the world. Somebody should probably look into doing something about that.
3. Terrains take the pages of data and make the polygons and textures.

Here is an overhead view:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Frontier #3: Adding Variety”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Coming up with rules and systems and algorithms to generate content is hard enough, but added to that challenge is the fact that we don’t have the benefit of any sort of pre-processing. If you’ve ever used a level editor, you know those things can eat a ton of time. They can take the data, cull out what isn’t needed, pre-compute the expensive stuff, and package things in a nice, organized way so that when the game is running, it can pull data off the disk and put it right to work.

With procedural stuff, you’ve got to do that work while the game is running. Without slowing things down. This moves all of that complexity into the game, and makes the system more complicated by requiring that it be done piecemeal. If you’ve played Minecraft, you’ve probably noticed the heavy lurch you get when the game has to generate some new landscape for you. I’m going to face that same problem with this project.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, a bit about how my program creates the terrain. First, it takes that low-level topography I generated in the previous step:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Frontier #2: Paging Data”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.