A few changes since my last update, I'll break it down!
- Boids code was working fine in Unity
- Decided I need a world to put the boids in order to make something worth looking at
- Decided my coder art sucks, so I might as well work on some procedural generation (bonus skills!)
- Built a procedural world generator in UnrealEngine C++
It's been going pretty good so far. I've built a heightmap with some Perlin noise, then used the UnrealEngine UProceduralMeshComponent to turn it into a quad mesh. I've then made a 3x3 grid of these zones which seamlessly tile. At least, now they seamlessly tile, had a few stitching issues initially!
All resolved now though, by expanding the zone heightmap to include the first cells in neighbouring zones to make sure the vertices match up.
Next up: spawning new zones as the player moves across boundaries, as well as destroying the old ones. Performance will be interesting here, I suspect I will be spawning threads to do this work ahead of time.
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