Procedural Generation Updates - March 22nd
- Details
- 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the repository has been moved onto a private Perforce instance, which means the Github version is now several weeks out of date.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.
The End Of A Very Busy Week
- Details
- 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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Procedural Generation Updates - March
- Details
- 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.
Procedural Generation Progress
- Details
- Category: Unrealengine
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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