World changes and improvements
DOMEN KONESKI
I was very skeptical about changing the current world of Floatlands game into a new one. Up until now it included floating islands, debris and details such as clouds. There was a lot of unused space (air) which was not defined gameplay-wise in any way. It was only a medium for traveling from one island to another, therefore making it a really boring routine to do.
We could fix and improve that by doing various things:
- allowing players to build in the air with more air-play,
- creating more debris/objects where players could land in the mid air,
- designing ‘spacecrafts’ with whom you could travel trough the world (good idea, but it is not appopriate lore-wise since we really want to improve on smaller aircrafts such as our little Buzzard),
- creating a ground level terrain which covers entire playable area (which should be large) with terrain.
The decision was obvious, we went with the latter choice. I started working on the so called Main Land island which will include all biomes we introduced already and floating islands. It will also have water (sea & rivers), Humans of Floatlands, our beautiful animals, basically everything we already worked on.
I’ve already done a lot towards creating this new ground level of Floatlands. There’s a whole-new procedural terrain generation, color blending between biomes and height differences, whole-new grass renderer using some advanced techniques and our current day/night cycle system.
The technical part of the New World
First of all, we generate the height map trough different sets of Perlin noises. We also have a biome map, which represents which biome is at specific position. The best part about this biome map is amount of mathematic principals and algorithms I’ve used to create a procedural biome map so it would look as natural as possible. Have a look:
Biome map texture
Blue represents sea/lakes/rivers, green represents our ‘normal’ biome (take a look at the bottom right, you can clearly see some micro islands will form), yellow-ish is desert and white are mountains with our snow biome. I easly implemented rivers using custom made Growing Trees algorithm. Here is the first test I ever did (it looks like ice cream – don’t mind the colors):
First procedural generation test with color blending
Meanwhile Mito and Andrej remodeled some of our trees, created new concepts for our metal/niter/stone veins (we’ve been using old models and they were really outdated speaking of general design).
3D models/render of the new concepts
After adding rivers system, new generator rules, grass and other natural objects, the world started to look familiar and appealing. We produced a short video showcasing the current state of the new world (note that floating islands are still missing in the video):
More about Floatlands: