Category: CashGen

A whole week gone already! Despite the Easter holiday weekend being quite busy I managed a few good sessions working on the procedural generation code. Main progress this week :

  • LOD parameters for zone spawning
  • Biomes - Attributes for zone blocks that dictate which predefined static meshes will be spawned
  • Refactoring - Slowly updating code and commenting BP-exposed functions
  • Slope attributes on blocks, cliff biomes etc.

I have a small list of items to work on before I push a milestone branch to github :

  • Multiple LODs per zone
  • Dynamic LOD switching
  • Fix the seam normals!
  • Switch to a more robust noise implementation (OpenSimplex)

Here's a wee update of how we're looking at the moment:

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Category: Unrealengine

Progress on the procedural generation project has been going well, here's a little taster :

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Most obvious addition is the foliage spawning using UE's instanced mesh components, performance is pretty impressive so far, although the real test is when grass is added, ideally UE's grass components could be used but currently the only seem to work for static meshes, it may require some tinkering.

As the project now includes paid for assets, the repository has been moved onto a private Perforce instance, which means the Github version is now several weeks out of date. The plan is once the code is tidied up a little to start pushing a working build onto Github once a week or so, or whenever there's a reasonably stable build, the first of these should be this weekend. 

Category: Site

It's been a pretty mad week, a lot of new stuff and some really good training at work, and I've been hammering away on the procedural generation code. It's 1730 on a Friday now and I am clocking off for a well-deserved day or so away from a compiler to give me brain a rest. Here's a little video of what I've been up to:

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Category: Unrealengine

I'd been hoping to get some more articles up, but I've been completely absorbed in building the procedural world generation project in UnrealEngine. I am just in the process of doing some refactoring and optimisation and hope to get some kind of write-up done in the next few weeks. It is draining my brain doing a couple of hours code before heading to the studio, and carrying on in the evening! Satisfying progress though :) Here's a quick video in the meantime :

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Basic first iteration

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Bit of fancy lighting and more polys

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Lakes!

As you can see currently I have split vertices and averaged normals producing flat-shaded polygons, which was a result of just taking the easy route for the first iteration. Right now I'm adding support for more efficient shared vertices and smooth shading, and some parameterisation for the multi-threading. The next major feature after that will be a LOD system.