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[Cunnah]

Hello,

I have posted about ADVENTURE! in the devlogs section.http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34168.0. I Also require input on the procedural gen section of the current dev build.

Adventure is a going to be a graphical rogue-like focusing on story telling. However currently I am only just working on world building. As you can see in the picture below it is still early days.

All feedback is welcome (even on my 5 min bang some textures through gimp filters job). I really need this input in order to progress.

Thanks.

[nenad]

I tested it on fairly old hardware (pentium 4).

Walking on map runs rather sluggishly. My framerate ballpark is about 10 fps. You should probably printout fps so we can benchmark it precisely. Performance-wise it'd also be good to include grass on/off option.

Map generation takes about 30 seconds. Maps look good. Just as a suggestion; you could try to make them look less "perlin noise" by grouping the biotopes. For instance, having only one or two dominant mountain ranges etc. That way the world could feel more meaningful. Probably not too crucial for a rougelike.

One thing you should add as soon as possible is depth fog. It helps in cuing distances. I was trying to walk to some mountains but didn't realized how far/big they were. Atmospheric fog helps greatly with that and it's probably just a matter of clicking a checkbox in Unity.

One piece of advice if I may. Try to make it into a functioning game with something to do as soon as possible. It's awfully easy to get stuck in the terrain generation minutia limbo forever as it is such an interesting thing to play with.
  

[Quicksand-S]

On my three year-old computer, I had results within ten seconds, which wasn't too bad. The game itself ran just fine and the 3d landscape loaded pretty quickly.

Although I figured it out right away, I imagine there should probably be some text telling the user to click on the map.

One thing I found a bit frustrating and strange was that I started out floating in the air at the spot I'd chosen from the map, but just before I was given control I would appear somewhere else entirely. I never got to explore the mountains or the shoreline because no matter where I clicked on the map, I was never able to start moving from my chosen point.

I love how the blades of grass look. I hope you'll keep that kind of painterly/gradient look.

I agree with nenad that you should probably start adding gameplay as soon as possible (unless you plan on just making a cool world-generating program, which can also be pretty fun). The fog also seems like a very good suggestion.

[Pishtaco]

Runs okay on my two-year old desktop. The landscape generated in around 15 seconds. I also like the painterly look of the steep surfaces, and think it could really use some aerial perspective.

[Cunnah]

Thanks for the feedback. The biggest problem for me is that my computer is more or less brand new. It makes getting a accurate feel for how things run a bit difficult. To be honest this test is a is it worth continuing test.

Map gen times sound good. I intend to add at least one basic tree and rocks so that I can begin implementing and testing some basic AI. The final view will be top down with mouse controlling character movement. Each section will be focused upon land marks so it won't feel as odd or difficult to reach interesting destinations. Next feedback post will be on AI and combat.

Distance fog is one of my next things to do, its not as simple as hitting a switch I need to render fog for the foreground and a different one for the background as they are at different scales. I thought I had it before reaching this deadline but it caused unpredictable results so it had to be disabled.

Quicksand-S when you click it first moves the camera to above the location you have selected,then generates the local terrain and finally puts you on the ground. You start around 20km in the sky just to avoid collision issues! One other thing for reference about 4 pixels on the map equate to about 2km. You need to click on the mountains to see mountains at the moment. Later the game will making these possible destinations to go to so it will be a lot easier.

[nenad]

Distance fog is one of my next things to do, its not as simple as hitting a switch I need to render fog for the foreground and a different one for the background as they are at different scales.

Why having different scales though? Shouldn't Unity be able to do proper terrain LOD? Fog is then trivial to handle from a shader (or using the default fixed pipeline fog)

[Cunnah]

Basically the program generates the section each time you click on it. I could build the section bigger and loose resolution or I could generate more tiles and increase the load time exponentially. Instead by faking the distance by having a scaled model for the background I can load the level with only two terrains and avoid floating point errors. 

[nenad]

Don't really get how you actually "fake" the distance.

Whichever way you optimize (or not), it doesn't affect the fog calculation as fog normally operates using z buffer data. Transformation matrix has noting to do with fog, save indirectly by positioning rasterized pixels farther or nearer in the z buffer. So default fog operation should be able to affect scaled parts of the terrain as expected.

Might be tangential but the best way to handle large terrains is to use some sort of space partitioning scheme coupled with an adaptive level-of-detail algorithm. Take a look at adaptive quad-trees:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3434/continuous_lod_terrain_meshing_.php

I'd expect Unity have something like this implemented.

[Quicksand-S]

One other thing for reference about 4 pixels on the map equate to about 2km. You need to click on the mountains to see mountains at the moment.

I see. That explains why I clicked right beside a lake and ended up a kilometer away.

On an unrelated note, it drives me crazy that I can't look up and down. I feel like I can't admire aspects of the landscape as well with the view locked like that.

[Cunnah]

yeah, don't worry about that next one will have a functioning camera. I had put a place-holder in to at least be able to view that things were working correctly.

@nenad Fog is working now, as I said it just needed some tweaking. Unity does do terrain lod handling, the issue is more loading times, each time you click on a section it is generated. Doing it this way means I only have to calculate 2 terrains and still maintain a good level of detail as opposed to 9. It's nothing to do with lod just the number of calculations needed to be done during loading. I intend for players to be able to hop from location to location and have random encounters long load times would be the death of the game. Thanks for taking the time into looking into other solutions I might end up experimenting later on down the line with some low res local space terrain but I feel I will still need the scaled background (we shall see!).

Right now I am putting some objects in for the AI to navigate around and actually putting AI into the game. I am probably not going to mess around with the art until I have something more concrete in the game end of things.

EDIT

@Quicksand-S: I have just realised I haven't put any water in on the local environment... could give you some interesting effects if you click on a lake!

[Cunnah]

Still working on things... I am hoping to have AI navigation working by the end of next week.

I do need some feedback. My world gen program is still being tweaked (although I am focusing on the actual game bits!) mostly because its fun, needs doing at some point and keeps me sane (my wife had to stop me tearing my monitor in half when my character started navigating vertically into thin air!).

Anyhow I was working on placing flower clumps here and there to break up the sea of endless green when for some reason my flowers exploded. I do however like it and want to know yay or nay guys?

***EDIT*** Another picture showing the transition.