Four weeks have passed, and still no new
NOWHERE alpha in sight. What's happening? Time to give you all a little heads up.
The colony as it looks at the moment was already cool enough to make a few jaws drop, but we're not happy. The game's world is supposed to be a rich diverse place, yet with a kind of homogeneous look but featuring a lot of distinct landmarks; as if that wasn't enough, each new play-through is supposed to throw the dices anew and generate a whole different look for the world. The colony will look a little different to each player.
In the first two weeks I worked on a base implementation for easily generating 2-manifold meshes based on Fabian Giesen's excellent
implementation guide on the subject, adding support for splitting vertices and faces, subdivision and texture mapping. In the rest of the time I worked on a generator for hexagonal
greeble patterns to skin meshes with interesting surfaces. It's very early stuff, and more is about to come in the following months.
I believe a few screenshots in chronological order will explain our progress best.
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| It all starts with a quad |
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| Splitting faces is one of the two elemental operators to increase mesh complexity |
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| Testing extrusion, which is built from the split vertex/face operators |
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| Added code for various base primitives, here's a cone. How awesome is that? Not much. Moving on. |
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| It took a long time to get this right: meshes with holes. |
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| A repeated sequence of face extrude & transform can yield pretty organic structures. |
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| Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces with support for creasing / semi-hard edges. I think we're done here. |
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| Just one of many failed attempts to somehow get a grip on a workable pattern technique. Terrible. |
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| This was one of the earliest hexagonal patterns we did, manually, a year ago. Why not do this procedurally? |
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| Eroded RLE noise with an axonometric projection, with islands identified and colored by flood-fill algorithm. Piece of cake. A bright spot kept whooshing by the window several times while I worked on this. I'm not fully sure but I believe it was the sun. |
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| Another generated pattern, this time with a more appropriate color scheme. |
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| This is what a generated texture tile looks like. |
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Testing one of the generated textures on a fitting object using Blender/Cycles. The procedural technique used here is
based on repeatedly simulating a round of Nibbles/Snake, by the way. |
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| Time to put it in the game. A first generated mesh looks pretty good! And yet still so much to do... |
Hope that was as interesting for you as it was for me. You'll find a few more pictures in my
Twitter gallery. Expect a new alpha build appearing in your account soon! Watch the skies!
