Saturday, February 19, 2011

Take a step back..

The reason I haven't posted much this week is because I decided to take a step back.  While I had made a neat little toy to play around in, it wasn't optimized at all and I didn't even know where to begin.  I really needed to learn more before I continued production of anything, so I started reading about Perlin and Simplex noise.  As I was trying to implement them, I realized that I simply don't know enough about Unity yet.  I need to learn the best practices when it comes to drawing objects on the screen and how to better light the scene, so I stepped back even more.

So I've spent the week reading a lot.  I do have a screenshot I can share of before I stopped reading.  I got my world smoothed out and it'll generate new chunks as you move along.


Anyway, it's back to basics for a little bit

Monday, February 14, 2011

Happy Valentines Day :]

I spent the weekend with the wife, so I didn't go to do much work unfortunately.  I did get some crunch time in after work though.

I've been playing with the terrain generation algorithm a lot.  I've tried the diamond square algorithm and it was neat, but I don't know if I did it right.  I've also tried 2 algorithms that I came up with on my own and in the end, I settled with one that I made.  It's not the prettiest yet but here's what I have so far:






This is all done with 1 pass through the world.  I can also generate from any point -> any point.  I call the algorithm using generateWorld(fromX, fromZ, toX, toZ) and direction doesn't matter.  Next thing on my list is to smooth everything out.  This will probably be done with a 2nd pass.. at least I think so.  I don't know, it's going to take some thinking.

This is all I've worked on tonight.  One thing I haven't figured out yet is how I'm going to do all the Y blocks, but that'll come eventually.