Looking Back

Once again I have mostly discarded my plans for the week. But still, the results are positive. I really wanted to get another slight visual upgrade done. Some weeks ago I changed the terrain geometry to pre-built blocks. Previously, all geometry was basically made up of unit cubes which were further split up into smaller parts, which could then be slightly offset to give the terrain some detail. Modern hardware has little trouble with this brute force approach but I required the more flexible building block method, anyway. An unsavoury consequence was a very flat and repetitive look of the ground. The current iteration uses tri-planar mapping of normal splat maps in a custom shader, which adds back some nice detail at very little cost (except some nerve-wracking wrangling of shader code).

The biggest deviation from my plan was that I decided to leave the task overview for a later time. It is not currently relevant, as there are much more pressing issues to resolve and try out. Therefore I gave the building system a shot. Check out a very early prototype, here:

It is done using uConstruct which takes a big load off of implementation time. After getting acquainted with it and writing some interaction code, the definition of a simple structure as seen in the video was pretty much done, already. I still need to beef up the system a little, especially adding variably sized walls and angled elements.

Looking Forward

Next week I will continue with the building system. For the game, it should only produce a building plan / blueprint, which settlers will then build when tasked. I would like to get in nicer looking building elements and a suitable building task.

Thanks for reading!